Stephen Coonts - Combat

Green wondered at the man. His teachers had been wrong. They did not even belong to the same species any more. All men were not created equal.

“My uncle … my father’s older brother …” Green said, “ … was killed by the Japanese. And I drive a Honda back home. We put the past behind us. That’s our strength.”

Frankie looked at him with raw disdain.

“That’s not strength,” he said. “That’s weakness.”

They followed a gulley between two fields. The beeches lining the depression had lost most of their leaves and Green ploughed through drifts of yellow and brown that rasped and splashed around his knees.

Apple cider. Sweaters. Parties. Kids goofy in their Halloween costumes. Vampires and ghosts. Ninjas. They had no idea what was frightening. The really terrifying creatures did not wear costumes or have horns or fangs or claws.

He worried that Frankie was right. That he would beg at the last minute. If he had to die … if he was going to die … he didn’t want the end to shame him.

What was he doing here anyway?

What on earth was he doing here?

He wished he had never become a soldier. Or that he had resigned his commission and married Caroline.

He had been so proud. Of his service, his rank. Of the achievements he had imagined held genuine importance.

This is what it came down to.

The leaves made a heart-wrenching sound as he crushed through them. Brutal with memories.

It was going to break his mother’s heart. And his father’s. His father had always been so proud of him. It was his mother who worried. About football injuries, or the wrong girl for him. About wars.

Did this even count as a war?

He decided he would fight at the end. No matter what. Even if he could only kick.

Unless he saw a chance to run.

He did not know what he would do.

Behind his back, Frankie was humming. Maybe the beauty of the afternoon had reached him, too.

The road had been built at an elevation above the fields, which lay in a floodplain. Its embankment rose before Green like a wall. The gulley narrowed to a culvert, with a half-blocked drainpipe showing daylight under the roadbed.

“Stop.”

Not here. Frankie would want to do it right up on the road. There was still time.

“The UN dicks are always on time, at least,” Frankie told him. “French colonel’s got himself one of their sluts over in the town. Noon to five, then he’s on the road again.”

Green waited. He sensed Frankie sniffing, sensing the world, listening.

Silence. No dogs, no motors. Not even a bird. Green shifted his weight and the leaves rustled. He tried one last time to work his hands free. Trying to do it discreetly. But the cords were ungiving.

“Okay,” Frankie said. “Get up there. Get going.”

The time to run would be just when he reached the flat of the road, while Frankie was still climbing the embankment. That would be his best chance. Run and jump down the other side. Then keep on running like hell. He couldn’t see yet, but he hoped the ground might drop even lower on the other side of the road. Maybe there would be some undergrowth. Anything that would give him a scrap of advantage.

He walked across a strip of ploughed-under field. With the air cold and thin in his lungs.

“God, please,” he prayed. “Please, help me now.”

He started up the embankment, struggling to keep his balance with his hands bound behind him.

As he approached the top, he saw that it was hopeless. There was only another field on the other side, wide open for at least two hundred meters before it ended against the next treeline.

He got ready to run anyway.

But Frankie’s hands were not bound. He beat Green to the top and covered him with the rifle, moving just in front of him, stepping backward.

Without prompting, they both stopped in the middle of the road.

“This is it, motherfucker.”

Green stared at the man who would kill him.

Frankie wasn’t smiling now. “Turn around,” he told Green. “You’ve got one minute. Pray, or do whatever you want. One minute.”

The last blue sky.

Green took off. He ran harder than he had ever run on any football field. He ran and waited for the shot.

He heard the crack of a rifle.

But he was still alive, still running.

And the sound had not been right. It had not been close enough.

He ran a little farther. When there was no second shot, he stopped. And turned around.

Frankie lay crumpled in the roadway. With his brains strewn over the asphalt. His eyes were open and stunned.

Green saw them then. Emerging from the far treeline. Someone shouted to him to stay where he was. Men in grayish fatigues. Bearded men. Wearing those little caps that always made him think of the old Howard Johnson’s hot-dog rolls. Silly caps. Those people.

Green sat down hard in the middle of the road and waited.

The hand-over took place on the border that night, with no time wasted and the usual suspects in attendance: the rag-tag killers who had saved his life, a French colonel, and a Dutch major. The U.S. attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Andretti, was on the receiving end.

Driving back to the embassy, Andretti listened to Green’s story. Green did not sugarcoat it.

“I was sure they were going to kill me,” Green concluded, rubbing his foot. His feet stank, but Andretti understood. “First that sonofabitch Frankie, then me. And pin it on him. I guess my cynicism’s showing.”

The attaché snorted and offered him another Diet Coke from the cooler. Real gringo Coke. “You got lucky. One man’s misfortune … you want another sandwich?” Andretti’s rough skin gleamed as a flash of headlights lit the back of the sedan. “Couple of reporters just found the biggest mass grave of the war. Seven, eight-hundred bodies, minimum. UN, Red Cross, NGOs, the press — everybody’s all over those people. Even the Russians look like they’re ready to back airstrikes against their little bearded brothers.” He snorted again. The bad air in the capital city had given Andretti asthma at the back end of his career. “You were their good deed for the day. After a decade of atrocious ones. They had everybody they could muster out looking for you. Onelegged distance runners and one-armed paper-hangers. We had to jump up and down to keep them on their side of the border. They figured out what was happening quicker than we did. And they were not going to take that rap, if they could help it. They’ve got enough on their plate already.”

Green considered the universe, then condensed it.

“I keep thinking about Bob Crawley.”

The little attaché settled back into his seat. “You’ll think about him for the rest of your life, Jeff.”

The President’s special envoy, a former ambassador playing hooky from Wall Street, had flown into the capital city that morning. His visit had nothing to do with Green, whose disappearance had been a sideshow in the circus of international relations. Nicholas Vollstrom was in the middle of another round of shuttle diplomacy, with airstrikes in the offing if the villains of the moment did not back down and do his bidding.

The diplomats assigned to the region had been trying to communicate the complexity of the situation to the President’s envoy for months, but had failed. Now, with Vollstrom anxious to go wheels-up for Brussels, where he had a come-to-Jesus session with the SACEUR the next morning, the ambassador had the attaché usher Major Green into the embassy’s secure bubble. In a last attempt to inject some reality into the envoy’s view of the world.

Green had not even showered. There had barely been time to wash the last crusts of blood from his face in the men’s room and change into the suit he kept in the office for meetings with the local bureaucrats. He had seen Vollstrom getting into a limo once. And he had read plenty about him. In person, the president’s man was beefy, running to fat. He wore glasses and spoke in a loud, high-pitched voice.