Lee Child - The Enemy

The lead tank rolled past us. Eleven feet wide, twenty-six feet long, nine and a half feet tall. Seventy tons. Its engine bellowed and its weight shook the ground. Its tracks squealed and clattered and slid on the concrete. Then the second tank rolled by. And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. The noise was deafening. The huge bulk of exotic metal buffeted the air. The gun barrels dipped and swayed and bounced. Exhaust fumes swirled all around.

There were altogether twenty tanks in the formation. They drove in through the gate and their noise and vibration faded behind us and then there was a short gap and a scout car came out of the mist straight toward us. It was a shoot-and-scoot Humvee armed with a TOW-2 antitank missile launcher. Two guys in it. I stepped into its path and raised my hand. Paused. I didn’t know Marshall and I had only ever seen him once, in the dark interior of the Grand Marquis outside Fort Bird’s post headquarters. But even so, I was pretty sure that neither of the guys in the Humvee was him. I remembered Marshall as large and dark and these guys were small, which is much more usual for Armored people. One thing there isn’t a lot of inside an Abrams is room.

The Humvee came to a stop right in front of me and I tracked around to the driver’s window. Summer took up station on the passenger side, standing easy. The driver rolled his glass down. Stared out at me.

“I’m looking for Major Marshall,” I said.

The driver was a captain and his passenger was a captain too. They were both dressed in Nomex tank suits, with balaclavas and Kevlar helmets with built-in headphones. The passenger had sleeve pockets full of pens. He had clipboards strapped to both thighs. They were all covered with notes. Some kind of score sheets.

“Marshall’s not here,” the driver said.

“So where is he?”

“Who’s asking?”

“You can read,” I said. I was wearing last night’s BDUs. They had oak leaves on the collar and Reacher on the stencil.

“Unit?” the guy said.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Marshall went to California,” he said. “Emergency deployment to Fort Irwin.”

“When?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Try to be.”

“Last night sometime.”

“That’s not very specific.”

“I’m honestly not sure.”

“What kind of an emergency have they got at Irwin?”

“I’m not sure about that either.”

I nodded. Stepped back.

“Drive on,” I said.

Their Humvee moved out from the space between us, and Summer joined me in the middle of the road. The air smelled of diesel and gas turbine exhaust and the concrete was scored fresh white by the passage of the tank tracks.

“Wasted trip,” Summer said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “Depends exactly when Marshall left. If it was after Swan’s phone call, that tells us something.”

We wereshunted between three different offices, trying to find out exactly what time Marshall left XII Corps. We ended up in a second-story suite that housed General Vassell’s operation. Vassell himself wasn’t there. We spoke to yet another captain. He seemed to be in charge of an administrative company.

“Major Marshall took a civilian flight at 2300,” he said. “Frankfurt to Dulles. Seven-hour layover and on to LAX from National. I issued the vouchers myself.”

“When?”

“As he was leaving.”

“Which was when?”

“He left here three hours before his flight.”

“Eight o’clock?”

The captain nodded. “On the dot.”

“I was told he was scheduled for night maneuvers.”

“He was. That plan changed.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

I’m not sure seemed to be XII Corps’ standard-issue answer for everything.

“What’s the panic at Irwin?” I said.

“I’m not sure.”

I smiled, briefly. “When were Marshall’s orders issued?”

“At seven o’clock.”

“Written?”

“Verbal.”

“By?”

“General Vassell.”

“Did Vassell countersign the travel vouchers himself?”

The captain nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “He did.”

“I need to speak to him,” I said.

“He went to London.”

“London?” I said.

“For a short-notice meeting with the British Ministry of Defense.”

“When did he leave?”

“He traveled to the airport with Major Marshall.”

“Where’s Colonel Coomer?”

“Berlin,” the guy said. “Souvenir hunting.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “He went to the airport with Vassell and Marshall.”

“No,” the captain said. “He took the train.”

“Terrific,” I said.

Summer andI went to the O Club for breakfast. We got the same corner table we had used the night before. We sat side by side, backs to the wall, watching the room.

“OK,” I said. “Swan’s office called for Marshall’s whereabouts at 1810 and fifty minutes later he had orders for Irwin. An hour after that he was off the post.”

“And Vassell lit out for London,” Summer said. “And Coomer jumped on a train for Berlin.”

“A night train,” I said. “Who goes on a night train just for the fun of it?”

“Everybody’s got something to hide,” she said.

“Except me and my monkey.”

“What?”

“The Beatles,” I said. “One of the sounds of the century.”

She just looked at me.

“What are they hiding?” she said.

“You tell me.”

She put her hands on the table, palms down. Took a breath.

“I can see part of it,” she said.

“Me too.”

“The agenda,” she said. “It was the other side of the coin from what Colonel Simon was talking about last night. Simon was salivating about the infantry taking Armored down a peg or two. Kramer must have seen all of that coming. Two-star generals aren’t stupid. So the Irwin conference on New Year’s Day was about fighting the opposite corner. It was about resistance, I guess. They don’t want to give up what they’ve got.”

“Hell of a thing to give up,” I said.

“Believe it,” she said. “Like battleship captains, way back.”

“So what was in the agenda?”

“Part defense, part offense,” she said. “That’s the obvious way to do it. Arguments against integrated units, ridicule of lightweight armored vehicles, advocacy for their own specialized expertise.”

“I agree,” I said. “But it’s not enough. The Pentagon is going to be neck-deep in position papers full of shit like that, starting any day now. For, against, if, but and however, we’re going to be bored to death with it. But there was something else in that agenda that made them totally desperate to get Kramer’s copy back. What was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me either,” I said.

“And why did they run last night?” Summer asked. “By now they must have destroyed Kramer’s copy and every other copy. So they could have lied through their teeth about what was in it, to put your mind at rest. They could even have given you a phony document. They could have said, Here you go, this was it, check it out.”

“They ran because of Mrs. Kramer,” I said.

She nodded. “I still think Vassell and Coomer killed her. Kramer croaks, the ball is in their court, in the circumstances they know it’s their responsibility to go out and round up all the loose paperwork. Mrs. Kramer goes down as collateral damage.”

“That would make perfect sense,” I said. “Except that neither one of them looked particularly tall and strong to me.”

“They’re both a lot taller and stronger than Mrs. Kramer was. Plus, you know, heat of the moment, pumped up with panic, we could be seeing ambiguous forensic results. And we don’t know how good the Green Valley people are anyway. Could be some family doctor doing a two-year term as coroner, and what the hell would he know?”