James Tabor - The Deep Zone

“Go on, Colonel, please.”

“Yes. Well, I had no choice, don’t you see? I would have risked my career by turning a blind eye to that exchange. It wasn’t something I really wanted to do, I can assure you.”

I bet not, fobbit , she thought. Ribbesh was not only a fobbit, he was a purveyor of chickenshit, which had a very special definition in the Army. She knew officers like Ribbesh, miserable people with small minds and great buzzing swarms of resentments. They lived to dole out chickenshit—unnecessary punishment for trivial infractions, the punishment bearing no appropriate relationship to the offense, the purpose being nothing more than making life worse for someone of lower rank. She also knew that the Army, which welcomed all and fired none, bore an inordinate number of chicken-shitters.

“Shouldn’t I have been notified? Served with a paper or something?”

“That’s what I’m doing now, Major.”

“Oh. Took you a while, then, didn’t it?”

His pink face got pinker. “It was necessary for the document to move through proper channels.”

“Of course,” she said. So there’ll be a letter in my Guard file. Big deal .

As if he had read her mind, he said, “I had a need to review your personnel file. Unfortunately, this was not the first occurrence of insubordination.”

“That’s true. Sometimes orders and good medicine don’t mix. From where I sit, medicine always trumps.”

“Yes, that was clear from your responses to the previous charges. Frankly, I was surprised. No ordinary officer could have gotten off so lightly. But then, you’re a doctor . Obviously exceptions were made.”

“Colonel, is there anything else? I’m tired and—”

“If you’ll allow me, I will complete this conference and leave. Because this was a subsequent incident, rather than an initial occurrence, the severity escalated. In addition to disciplinary action, it appears that there will be DOB as well.”

Denial of benefits . Her tired heart wrenched. “What are you saying?”

“From the Army’s point of view, Major, it is no different than shooting your toe off to escape combat. Your intention might have been noble, but, to paraphrase your words, orders always trump intention. In essence, you inflicted this infection on yourself.”

“So you’re saying that I will bear the expenses for all of my medical care.”

“That is correct, I’m afraid.”

“Stateside as well as here?”

“Yes.”

She experienced a new dread so intense it made her dizzy and even more nauseous. Her civilian, private health insurance provided zero coverage when she was on active duty. That was when the military Tricare program kicked in, and, as a physician, she knew the regulation verbatim: “When on military duty, members are covered for any injury, illness or disease incurred or aggravated in the line of duty.”

She also knew, however, that Tricare had exclusions, including—as Ribbesh the fobbit had pointed out—self-inflicted injuries. If she lived, the expenses could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would bankrupt them. The house, the cars, their savings… everything would be consumed. Because of this fat little fobbit.

But then she realized it wasn’t as bad as the fobbit obviously thought it would be, because she was not going to need a lot of medical treatment. She knew the odds. So if she died… no, when she died, Doug and Danny would receive the payout from her military life insurance. Five hundred thousand dollars. They could take care of the mortgage and be secure for the rest of their lives, if they invested wisely. So the fobbit was not getting over on her, as he assumed. She wanted him out.

“Colonel, I respectfully request that you exit my room and leave me alone. I will summon medical staff if I have to.”

“I was just leaving, Major,” he said. “But there is one more thing I am required to communicate.”

She waited, glaring, one hand holding the call button.

“DOB cases involve not only denial of medical benefits, but of death benefits as well. We can’t very well be paying huge life insurance dividends for people who cause their own deaths, can we? Army regulations, I’m afraid. I’m sure you’re familiar with General Order Nineteen, Section B3, Subsections r and s.”

“Get out! Now .”

“Goodbye, Major.” He dropped the heavy envelope on the foot of her bed. “I imagine someone here can help you review the documentation.” Colonel Ribbesh waddled out, buttocks pushing against the Chemturion’s heavy plastic.

IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER THREE A.M. AND DAVID LATHROP had been moving fast, running between the secretary’s office and BARDA and half a dozen other places, nonstop, since six that morning. His eyes felt like someone had thrown sand in them, his mouth tasted like spoiled meat, and his brain was grinding up thoughts before he could finish them.

“Time to call it.” He pushed up from his chair too quickly, felt light-headed, leaned over with both hands on his desk until he steadied. Whenever he was on duty, Lathrop kept his vest buttoned and tie snug around his collar. Discipline was the key to the universe, and if you built it one small step at a time, the big things took care of themselves. We are our habits . He loved that saying, though just now he could not have told you its source to save his life.

Lathrop did allow himself to hang up his suit jacket after six P.M., however. Walking to the closet in his office, he shrugged into the jacket, concealing the SIG Sauer he carried in a fine leather shoulder holster. He could have carried, compliments of Uncle Sam, a standard-issue Glock 9mm, but he preferred the extra power of the big .40-cal load and the greater reliability of the SIG. He had heard too many stories about Glocks jamming at inopportune times. Or he could have carried no weapon at all. The likelihood of him getting into a firefight now was about the same as his getting hit by lightning. His rock-and-roll field days were years behind him. But once upon a time, when he ran agents in Iraq and Pakistan, the need to carry a weapon had been real and ever-present. After all those years of going armed, being without a gun made him as uncomfortable as walking around without pants. And he reasoned that if one chose to carry a handgun, one should provide oneself with the very best, and that was a SIG Sauer. They were built like Swiss watches and never, ever malfunctioned. They cost an arm and a leg, true, but that was a fair price for life insurance.

As a GS-15, the highest nonappointed federal employment grade, Lathrop had an assigned space on the parking garage’s blue level, beneath the Homeland Security headquarters building. A year earlier, the department had moved from its temporary offices over on Nebraska Avenue to this new $6 billion complex, which held no fewer than seven major federal agencies, in addition to the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the National Cyber Security Division. It was not a little ironic, Lathrop often reflected, that the gigantic new headquarters facility was located on the former grounds of Washington’s infamous St. Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric facility that had treated, or at least housed, the legally and criminally insane since 1852. After all, if 9/11’s perpetrators and consequences were not insane, then who and what on earth was?

The official address of the new Homeland Security complex was 1100 Alabama Avenue SE. Lathrop drove up out of the parking garage and headed for the Alabama Avenue exit. He stopped in front of massive gates bristling with razor wire and security cameras. Presently two uniformed Homeland Security guards came out of the small-windowed concrete gatehouse and approached Lathrop’s car. The screening for outgoing personnel was no less intense than that for incoming. Lathrop knew one of the guards, a young man named Jermayn Foster. During Lathrop’s countless comings and goings, he had encountered Foster often, and now and then they chatted. Foster had come over from Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, where he had been stuck at sergeant grade, hoping for better promotion possibilities in the vast federal system. A tall, thin man, he moved to the driver’s side while his partner—a man Lathrop did not know—walked to the passenger side and illuminated the interior of Lathrop’s vehicle with a million-candlepower spotlight. Lathrop knew that closed-circuit cameras and NBC—Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical—detectors were scanning the underside of his car at the same time.