Lee Child - The Enemy

I cued Summer to complete the formalities. There were all kinds of things from the Uniform Code that you had to spell out. All kinds of advisements and warnings. Summer ran through them better than I would have. Her voice was clear and her manner was professional. Neither Vassell nor Coomer responded at all. No bluster, no pleading, no angry protestations of innocence. They just nodded obediently in all the right places. Got up out of their chairs at the end without even being told.

“Handcuffs?” Summer asked me.

I nodded.

“For sure,” I said. “And walk them to the brig. All the way. Don’t put them in the truck. Let everybody see them. They’re a disgrace.”

I gotdirections from a cavalry guy and took Franz’s Humvee to go get Marshall. He was supposed to be camped out in a hut near a disused range target, observing. The disused target was described to me as an obsolete Sheridan tank. It was supposed to be fairly beat-up. The hut was supposed to be in better shape and close to the old tank. I was told to stick to the established tracks to avoid unexploded ordnance and desert tortoises. If I ran over the ordnance, I would be killed. If I ran over the tortoises, I would be reprimanded by the Department of the Interior.

I left the main post alone, at nine-thirty in the morning exactly. I didn’t want to wait for Summer. She was all tied up with processing Vassell and Coomer. I felt like we were at the end of a long journey, and I just wanted to get it over. I took a borrowed sidearm, but it was still a bad decision.

Irwin owned enoughof the Mojave that it could be a plausible stand-in for the vast deserts of the Middle East or, if you ignored the heat and the sand, a plausible stand-in for the endless steppes of Eastern Europe. Which meant I was long out of sight of the main post buildings before I was even a tenth of the way to the promised Sheridan tank. The terrain was completely empty all around me. The Humvee felt tiny out there. It was January so there was no heat shimmer but the temperature was still pretty high. I applied what the unofficial Humvee manual called 2-40 air-conditioning, which meant you opened two windows and drove at forty miles an hour. That set up a decent breeze. Normally forty miles an hour in a Humvee feels pretty fast because of its bulk. But out there in the vastness it felt like no speed at all.

A whole hour later I was still doing forty and I still hadn’t found the hut. The range went on forever. Irwin was one of the world’s great military reservations. That was for sure. Maybe the Soviets had a bigger place somewhere, but I would have been surprised. Maybe Willard could have told me. I smiled to myself and kept on going. Drove over a ridge and saw an empty plain below me. A dot on the next horizon that might have been the hut. A dust cloud maybe five miles to the west that might have been tanks on the move.

I kept to the track. Kept going at forty. Dust was trailing behind me like a tail. The air coming in the windows was hot. The plain was maybe three miles across. The dot on the horizon became a speck and then grew larger the closer I got to it. After a mile I could make out two separate shapes. The old tank on the left, and the observation hut on the right. After another mile I could make out three separate shapes. The old tank on the left, the observation hut on the right, and Marshall’s own Humvee in the middle. It was parked to the west of the building, in the morning shade. It looked like the same shoot-and-scoot adaptation I had seen at XII Corps in Germany. The building was a simple raw cinder-block square. Big holes for windows. No glass. The tank was an old M551, which was a lightweight armored-aluminum piece that had started its design life as a reconnaissance vehicle. It was about a quarter of the weight of an Abrams and it was exactly the type of thing that people like Lieutenant Colonel Simon were betting the future on. It had seen service with some of our Airborne divisions. It wasn’t a bad machine. But this example looked pretty much decomposed. It had old plywood skirts on it designed to make it resemble some kind of previous-generation Soviet armor. There had been no point in training our guys to shoot at something our other guys were still using.

I stayed on the track and coasted to a stop about thirty yards south of the hut. Opened the door and slid out into the heat. I guessed it was less than seventy degrees but after North Carolina and Frankfurt and Paris it felt like Saudi Arabia.

I saw Marshall watching me from a hole in the cinder block.

I had only seen him once and never face-to-face. He had been in the Grand Marquis on New Year’s Day, outside Bird’s post headquarters, in the dark, behind green-tinted glass. I had pegged him then as a tall dark guy and his file had confirmed it. He looked just the same now. Tall, heavy, olive skin. Thick black hair cut short. He was in desert camouflage and he was stooping a little to see out the cinder-block hole.

I stood next to my Humvee. He watched me, silently.

“Marshall?” I called.

He didn’t respond.

“You alone in there?”

No reply.

“Military police,” I called, louder. “All personnel, exit that structure immediately.”

Nobody responded. Nobody came out. I could still see Marshall through the hole. He could still see me. I guessed he was alone. If he had had a partner in there, the partner would have come out. Nobody else had a reason to be afraid of me.

“Marshall?” I called again.

He ducked out of sight. Just melted backward into the shadows inside. I took the borrowed gun out of my pocket. It was a new-issue Beretta M9. I heard an old training mantra in my head: Never trust a weapon that you haven’t personally test-fired . I chambered a round. The sound was loud in the desert stillness. I saw the dust cloud in the west. It was maybe a little larger and a little closer than before. I clicked the Beretta’s safety to Fire .

“Marshall?” I called.

He didn’t reply. But I heard a low voice very faintly and then a brief scratchy burst of radio static. There was no antenna on the roof of the hut. He must have had a portable field radio in there with him.

“Who are you going to call, Marshall?” I said to myself. “The cavalry?”

Then I thought: The cavalry. An armored cavalry regiment . I turned and looked west at the dust cloud. Suddenly realized how things stood. I was all alone in the middle of nowhere with a proven killer. He was in a hut, I was out in the open. My partner was a ninety-pound woman about fifty miles away. His buddies were riding around in seventy-ton tanks just below the visible horizon.

I got off the track fast. Worked around to the east of the hut. I saw Marshall again. He moved from one hole to another and watched me. Just gazed out at me.

“Step out of the hut, Major,” I called.

There was silence for a long moment. Then he called back to me.

“I’m not going to do that,” he said.

“Step out, Major,” I called. “You know why I’m here.”

He ducked back into the darkness.

“As of right now you’re resisting arrest,” I called.

No reply. No sound at all. I moved on. Circled the hut. Worked around to the north. There were no holes in the north wall. Just an iron door. It was closed. I figured it wouldn’t have a lock. What was there to steal? I could walk right up to it and pull it open. Was he armed ? I guessed standard procedure would make him unarmed. What kind of deadly enemy could a gunnery observer expect to face? But I guessed a smart guy in Marshall’s situation would be taking all kinds of precautions.

There was beaten earth outside the iron door where people had made informal tracks to places they had parked. What an architect would call pathways of desire . None of them led north toward me. They all led roughly west or east. Shade in the morning, shade in the afternoon. So I stayed on open ground and got within ten yards of the door. Then I stopped. A good position, on the face of it. Maybe better than going all the way in and risking a surprise. I could wait there all day. No problem. It was January. The noon sun wasn’t going to hurt me. I could wait until Marshall gave up. Or starved to death. I had eaten more recently than he had. That was for sure. And if he decided to come out shooting, I could shoot him first. No problem with that either.