Bob shook his head. “The freezer won’t do it,” he said. “When it goes, everything is going, including the electricity.”
“But we’ve got our own generator, and one hundred-pound propane tank.”
“Which, if we run it full time, will last us for about two weeks. I believe we are looking at a year of being totally on our own.”
“A year?” Ellen gasped.
“Or longer,” Bob said.
In the living room they could hear the TV still going.
A suicide bomber blew himself up today in Grand Central Station in New York. Nineteen were killed and at least thirty more were injured. That is the fourth terrorist attack in the continental United States in the last twenty days, bringing the death toll total to eighty-six.
President Ohmshidi lodged a strong protest with the government of Yazikistan, but President Rafeek Syed dismissed the protest as the meaningless whining of a nation of kafirs, or unbelievers.
CHAPTER NINE
Base Hospital, Fort Rucker—Friday, June 15
“Hello, Colonel Chambers,” Karin said, putting on as cheerful a front as she could. The patient, Colonel Garrison J. Chambers, a veteran of World War II, was ninety years old. One week earlier he had cut his leg on a piece of rusty, corrugated tin. That cut had gotten infected and the infection was spreading. He should have been given penicillin, but there was no penicillin available.
Karin once read that honey had been used for hundreds of years to treat infected wounds and though the doctor told her she was being foolish when she suggested they try it, he had finally come around. Chambers’s wound was being treated with honey.
Karin removed the bandage and looked at the wound. It might have been her imagination, but she believed she was seeing some improvement. She began cleansing the area around the wound.
“How does it look?” Colonel Chambers asked.
“It’s looking good,” Karin said.
Chambers lifted his head and looked down at his leg. “Captain, if you think that looks good, you are definitely a woman who isn’t turned off by ugly. And that, my dear”—he pointed to the purple, puffy wound—“has a serious case of ugly.”
“Oh, it’s all in the eyes of the beholder,” Karin said.
“Hmm, where were you seventy years ago when I needed a woman who could overlook ugly?”
Karin laughed. “I’ll bet you were a fine-looking young officer,” she said. “I read in your records that you spent some time in Paris immediately after the war.”
Karin knew that Colonel Chambers, as a company commander in the 101st Airborne, had also jumped into France on D-Day, and had been at Bastogne during the siege, where he was awarded the Silver Star and a Purple Heart.
“I was in Paris, yes.”
“Now, be truthful, Colonel,” she said, as she used peroxide-soaked cotton balls to dab gently around his wound. “Did you, or did you not have your share of beautiful young French ladies?”
“Ahh, you do bring up memories, my dear,” Colonel Chambers said. “I seem to recall that there is one particularly pretty young lady who always sits down at the end of the bar at the Parisian Pony. Lovely thing she is, high-lifted breasts, long, smooth legs. I hope I’m not embarrassing you.”
“Not at all, I’m enjoying the description,” Karin replied.
Colonel Chambers was quiet for a moment. “I can see her now. She is so beautiful. Or was, I should say. My Lord, Chantal would be in her late eighties now. All of them. Every young woman I knew there. The soldiers too, the men who served with me, and under me. They were all so young then, and when I think of them, I remember them as they were, not as they must be now.” He grew pensive.
“All memories are like that, Colonel.”
“I suppose they are. If nobody has told you before, Captain, getting old—what is the term the young people use? Oh, yes, sucks. Getting old sucks.”
“Yes, but consider the alternative,” Karin said.
Colonel Chambers laughed out loud. “Good point, Captain, good point,” he said.
“Tell me, my dear, when I get out of here, would you be too terribly embarrassed to have dinner with an old man?”
“Embarrassed? Not at all,” Karin said. “I would love to have dinner with you.”
“That is, assuming there is a restaurant still open somewhere by then. I’ve lived under eighteen presidents ; none have frightened me as much as this one does.” He reached up to take Karin’s hand in his. “On the one hand, I am glad I am so old because I don’t believe living under this president is going to be very pleasant. On the other hand, I defended this country for many years, and I almost feel as if it would be an act of betrayal on my part if I were to die now, and leave this mess behind me.”
“Say what you want about yourself, Colonel, but don’t ever feel that you have betrayed your country in any way.”
“I notice by the lack of a ring that you aren’t married. But do you have a young man?” Colonel Chambers asked.
“I do,” Karin said. “But he wouldn’t mind at all my having dinner with you.”
“Ohh,” Colonel Chambers said. “Darlin’, when a pretty young girl says she will have dinner with you, and then says in the same breath that it won’t matter to her beau, that’s when you know you are getting very old.”
Karin laughed, then leaned over and kissed him on the forehead before she left.
Environmental Flight Tactics
Jake was sitting at his desk reviewing the new curriculum, lesson plans, and objectives, as well as a new SOP, wondering what he could come up with next to keep the men busy. Sergeant Major Clay Matthews tapped lightly on the door to his office, then pushed it open.
“Major Lantz?”
“Yes, Sergeant Major, come on in,” Jake said, pushing the written material to one side. “Have a seat,” he offered.
“How are the new lesson plans?” Clay asked.
“They are good,” Jake said. “They are surprisingly good. I just wish we could get the training going again so we could implement them. What’s on your mind?”
“I thought you might like to know that I have everything on your list that you asked for.”
“Including fuel? Jet fuel, I mean. I know you got the gasoline last month.”
“Yes, sir, I got the jet fuel.”
“I’m impressed,” Jake said. “How did you do that?”
“I had General von Cairns sign for a fifty-barrel emergency reserve.”
“And you convinced him to do that?”
“Not exactly,” Clay said. “Turns out that Specialist Roswell, who works down at HQ, can sign the general’s name as well as the general can. He signed an 1195 for me.”
“You didn’t tell him what this was about, did you?”
“No. I convinced him that I was going to sell it on the black market and give him half the profit.”
“I don’t know, Sergeant Major,” Jake said. “If there is no sale and he doesn’t get his share, it could cause us some trouble.”
Clay shook his head. “Not really, sir,” he said. “First of all, he’s not going to be able to say that he signed the general’s name without getting himself in a lot of trouble. And secondly, I have already sold fifteen barrels for five thousand dollars per barrel. I’m going to give Roswell the entire seventy-five thousand and tell him that’s half.”
“So, we have thirty-five barrels left?”
“No, sir, we have fifteen barrels left. I told the POL sergeant that the general had really only requested thirty barrels, but I changed the number. That way he could have twenty barrels to do whatever he wants with. That expedited the operation and it also kept him from making any telephone calls back to the general to verify the requisition.”
Jake chuckled. “I’m glad you are working for me, instead of against me.”
“I would never work against you, Major,” Clay said. He smiled. “I might be a thief, but I am a thief with honor.”
“I can’t argue with that, Sergeant Maj
or.”
“Oh, and I got a desalination device. Hand pump, not power. I figure we may not always have power.”
“Good move,” Jake said, just as the phone rang. He picked it up. “Environmental Flight Tactics, Major Lantz. All right, thank you. I’ll be right there.”
Hanging up the phone, he ran his finger down the scar on his cheek for a moment. “That was the general’s office,” he said. “He’s issued an officers’ call. I hope it’s not . . .”
“It has nothing to do with our scrounging, sir,” Clay said. “It is something else. Something entirely different.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Yes, sir, I think I do.”
“What is it?”
“I’d rather not say, sir,” Clay said. “I think you should hear it from the general himself.”
“All right, I will,” Jake said, standing up and reaching for his black beret. “You did well, Clay. You did damn well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Jake learned that this officers’ call involved more than half of the officers on the post, including not just department heads and unit commanders, but all staff and faculty, hospital personnel, officers of the TO&E units, and even those officers who had returned from overseas and were now at Fort Rucker awaiting further assignment. The officers’ call was held in the post theater, and every seat was filled.
“Gentlemen, the commanding general!” someone called, and all stood.
“Seats, gentlemen, seats,” General von Cairns said as he strolled briskly onto the stage. Walking up to the podium, he tapped twice on the microphone, and was rewarded with a thumping sound that returned through the speakers and reverberated through the auditorium.
“Gentlemen, I will make this announcement short and sweet. I will take no questions afterward because I have no further information. I’m afraid you will just have to hear the announcement, then wait and see where it leads.
“This morning I was informed by the Department of the Army that, effective within the next thirty days, there will be a seventy five percent reduction in force in both officer and enlisted ranks. In short, gentlemen, one month from now, three out of four officers and men throughout the entire army, will be gone.
The theater rang with loud shouts of shock and dismay.
“No!”
“What the hell is going on?”
“What is the cutoff? What if we are within months of retirement?”
“I don’t know that there is a cutoff,” von Cairns said. “There was no mention of it. And, gentlemen, I’ll be honest with you; I don’t know that there will be any more retirements. I know that those who are currently retired have not received their retirement checks for some time, now.”
“This isn’t right!”
“This is the president’s idea?”
“So I have been told,” von Cairns replied.
“What’s wrong with this man? Is he insane?
“This so-called president is destroying the Army. And with it, the nation,” Colonel Haney said.
“Somebody needs to drop-kick that foreign son of a bitch from here back to Pakistan!” a chief warrant officer said.
“Gentlemen, please,” von Cairns said, lifting his hands to request order. “I can only tell you what I know. And I know that this was soundly protested by the Department of Defense. By the way, disabuse yourself of any thought that the Army is taking this hit alone. Because this order does come directly from the president, it pertains to all branches of the service, active, reserve, and guard.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen, I wish I had better news for you. This meeting is dismissed.”
As the officers filed out of the theater, still stunned from the general’s announcement, Jake saw Karin standing with another group of nurses. He didn’t want to intrude so he started to walk away, but, seeing him, she hurried over to join him.
“That was quite a shocker, wasn’t it?” she asked as she fell in beside him.
“I’ll be one of the first to leave,” Jake said.
“What makes you think so? You have an exemplary military record, outstanding OERs, combat time, not only combat time but combat command time, with a Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, not to mention a Purple Heart.”
“Karin, I have not had a student in over three months, and I have not flown so much as one hour in all that time. I can’t see the Army paying me to sit behind a desk and drum my fingers. At least you have been kept busy.”
“True, we have been busy at the hospital, but eighty percent of our workload has been with retirees and veterans, and we heard that hospital service for non-active duty personnel is about to be stopped. Nurses don’t have any special protective status, and you heard what the general said. Seventy-five percent of us are going to be gone.”
“Do you have any patients depending on you, this afternoon?”
Karin thought of Colonel Chambers. She had cleaned and doctored his wound this morning, and he was resting comfortably when she left. She had no other patients who were at a critical stage.
“No, not really,” she said.
“Then don’t go back to the hospital. Take the rest of the day off and let’s go out to Lake Tholocco.”
“What? You mean now? Just leave?”
“Why not?” Jake asked. “What are they going to do? Kick us out of the Army?”
Karin laughed. “You are right. What are they going to do?”
Leaving the theater, Jake drove not to the lake, but to the post commissary. When he parked the car, Karin started to get out, but Jake reached out to stop her.
“No, you stay here and listen to music,” he said. “I’ll be right back out.”
“Are you sure? I know how you hate to shop. I’ll be glad to help you.”
“I may not want you to see what I’m buying.”
“Oh, a mystery? I like mysteries.”
Ten minutes later Jake came through the checkout line. When his purchase was rung up, it came to six hundred and fifty-two dollars.
“What, and no cents?” he asked with a sarcastic growl.
“We don’t mess with anything less than a dollar anymore,” the clerk replied with a straight face.
“Tell me something,” Jake said. “How do the lower-ranking enlisted personnel handle this?”
“They don’t. Since the one hundred thousand dollars everyone was given ran out, I haven’t seen anyone below E-6 in here.”
“Where do they go? As expensive as it is, groceries are still cheaper in the commissary than they are off post.”
“Tell me about it,” the clerk said. “I work here, but because I am a civilian, I can’t buy here. And the truth is, I couldn’t afford it if I could.”
Jake returned to the car carrying all his purchases in one sack. He set the sack on the floor behind his seat.
“I thought you were going to listen to music. What is that noise you are listening to?” he asked.
“Top Dollar.”
“That’s not music.”
“What do you call music?”
Jake punched a button to switch to a classical station.
“There you go,” he said. “‘Emperor Waltz.’ That’s music.”
Lake Tholocco is a six hundred fifty-acre lake located entirely within the confines of Fort Rucker. The lake officers’ club was at one time a favorite hangout for the young bachelor officers, but when the Army and the other branches of service did away with officers’ clubs, the lake club lost some of its cachet.
The lake was still a popular place to go though, with swimming, skiing, boating, and even fishing. There were also several rustic cabins around the lake in an area known as Singing Pines, and Jake pulled up in front of one of them.
“You have a key to this cabin?” Karin asked.
“Yes.”
“You mean you planned to come out here? This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing?”
“Karin, you know me well enough to know that I plan everything,” Jake answered.
Getting out of the car, Jake reached into the back to retrieve his commissary purchases.
“When do I learn what you bought?” Karin asked, also exiting the car.
“Two steaks, two baking potatoes, two prepared salads, a loaf of French bread, garlic, salt, pepper, two root beers, and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. You wanted romantic, I’m giving you romantic.”
“Is a secluded cabin on the lake a part of that romantic scene?” Karin asked.
Jake smiled at her. “Yeah, it’s the biggest part.”
Jake made use of the charcoal grill outside the cabin to cook the two steaks. There was no charcoal available, but there were pine cones, and they made a suitable substitute. Karin put the potatoes in the oven and the salad and drinks in the refrigerator. That done, she came back outside to stand with Jake.
“I wish I had known we were coming to the lake, I would have brought my bathing suit in to work this morning.”
“You can always skinny-dip,” Jake suggested.
“You tease, but as deserted as the lake is now, I believe I could do that. I know it is still duty hours, but there is almost always someone here. Where is everyone?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if half the people on the base were gone by now,” Jake said.
“Gone where?”
“On their way home, wherever that is. Karin, did you know that Clay Matthews knew about this even before the general announced it?”
“How did he know?”
“It’s the NCO underground,” Jake said. “I learned a long time ago that NCOs and even the lower-ranking enlisted personnel tend to find out things a lot faster than the officers do. I doubt, very much, that there was one enlisted man on this base who did not know what the general was going to tell us, even before he told us this afternoon. There’s no telling how many of them have packed up and left today.”
“You mean they’ve already gotten their RIF orders?”
“No orders, they just left”
“Deserted, you mean.”
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