Lee Child - The Enemy

I struggled back up and crawled forward. Just butted my way through fallen beams and lumps of broken concrete. I threw twisted sheets of roofing iron aside. I was like a plow. Like a bulldozer, grinding forward, piling debris to the left and right of me. There was too much dust to see anything except the sunlight. It was right there in front of me. Brightness ahead, darkness behind. I kept on going.

I found the Mag-10. Its barrel was crushed. I threw it aside and plowed on. Found Marshall on the floor. He wasn’t moving. I pulled stuff off him and grabbed his collar and hauled him up into a sitting position. Dragged him forward until I came to the front wall. I put my back against it and slid upright until I felt the window aperture. I was choking and spitting dust. It was in my eyes. I dragged him upward and hauled him over the windowsill and dumped him out. Then I fell out after him. Got up on my hands and knees and grabbed his collar again and dragged him away. Outside the hut the dust was clearing. I could see tanks, maybe three hundred yards to the left and right of us. Lots of tanks. Hot metal in the harsh sunlight. They had outflanked us. They were holding in a perfect circle, engines idling, guns flat, aiming over open sights. I heard boom whump again and saw a bright muzzle flash from one of them and saw it pitch backward from the recoil. I saw its shell pass right over us. I saw it in the air. Heard it break the sound barrier with a crack like a neck snapping. Heard it smash into the remains of the hut. Felt more dust and concrete shower down on my back. I went down on my face and lay still, trapped in no-man’s-land.

Then another tank fired. I saw it jerk backward from the recoil. Seventy tons, smashed back so hard its front end came right up in the air. Its shell screamed overhead. I started moving again. I dragged Marshall behind me and crawled through the dirt like I was swimming. I had no idea what he had said on the radio. No idea what his orders had been. He had to have told them he was moving out. Maybe he had told them to disregard the Humvees. Maybe that explained their Say again ? Maybe he had told them the Humvees were fair game. Maybe that was what they had found hard to believe.

But I knew they wouldn’t stop firing now. Because they couldn’t see us. Dust was drifting like smoke and the view out of a buttoned-up Abrams wasn’t great to begin with. It was like looking lengthwise through a grocery bag with a small square hole cut out of the bottom. I paused and batted dust out of the way and coughed and peered forward. We were close to my Humvee.

It looked straight and level.

It looked intact.

So far.

I stood up and raced the last ten feet and hauled Marshall around to the passenger side and opened the door and crammed him into the front. Then I climbed right in over him and dumped myself into the driver’s seat. Hit that big red button and fired it up. Shoved it into gear and stamped on the gas so hard the acceleration slammed the door shut. Then I turned the lights full on and put my foot to the floor and charged. Summer would have been proud of me. I drove straight for the line of tanks. Two hundred yards. One hundred yards. I picked my spot and aimed carefully and burst through the gap between two main battle tanks doing more than eighty miles an hour.

I sloweddown after a mile. After another mile, I stopped. Marshall was alive. But he was unconscious and he was bleeding all over the place. My aim had been good. His shoulder had a big messy nine-millimeter broken-bone through-and-through gunshot wound in it and he had plenty of other cuts from the hut’s collapse. His blood was all mixed with cement dust like a maroon paste. I got him arranged on the seat and strapped him in tight with the harness. Then I broke out the first-aid kit and put pressure bandages on both sides of his shoulder and jabbed him with morphine. I wrote M on his forehead with a grease pencil like you were supposed to in the field. That way the medics wouldn’t overdose him when he got to the hospital.

Then I walked around in the fresh air for a spell. Just walked up and down the track, aimlessly. I coughed and spat and dusted myself down as well as I could. I was bruised and sore from being pelted with concrete fragments. Two miles behind me I could still hear tanks firing. I guessed they were waiting for a cease-fire order. I guessed they were likely to run out of rounds before they got one.

I keptthe 2-40 A/C going all the way back. Halfway there, Marshall woke up. I saw his chin come up off his chest. Saw him glance ahead, and then at me to his left. He was full of morphine and his right arm was useless, but I was still cautious. If he grabbed the wheel with his left he might force us off the track. He might run us over some unexploded debris. Or a tortoise. So I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic . He stayed out all the way back to the post.

I drovehim straight to the base hospital. Called Franz from the nurses’ station and ordered up a guard squad. I waited for them to arrive and promised rank and medals for anyone who helped ensure Marshall saw the inside of a courtroom. I told them to read him his rights as soon as he woke up. And I told them to mount a suicide watch. Then I left them to it and drove back to Franz’s office. My BDUs were torn up and stiff with dust and I guessed my face and hands and hair didn’t look any better because Franz laughed as soon as he saw me.

“I guess it’s tough taking desk jockeys down,” he said.

“Where’s Summer?” I said.

“Telexing JAG Corps,” he said. “Talking to people on the phone.”

“I lost your Beretta,” I said.

“Where?”

“Somewhere it’s going to take a bunch of archaeologists a hundred years to find.”

“Is my Humvee OK?”

“Better than Marshall’s,” I said.

I found my bag and an empty VOQ room and took a long hot shower. Then I transferred all my pocket stuff to a new set of BDUs and trashed the damaged ones. I figured any quartermaster would agree they were deteriorated beyond reasonable future use. I sat on the bed for a while. Just breathed in, breathed out. Then I walked back to Franz’s place. I found Summer there. She was looking radiant. She was holding a new file folder that already had a lot of pages in it.

“We’re on track,” she said. “JAG Corps says the arrests were righteous.”

“Did you lay out the case?”

“They say they’ll need confessions.”

I said nothing.

“We have to meet with the prosecutors tomorrow,” she said. “In D.C.”

“You’ll have to do it,” I said. “I won’t be around.”

“Why not?”

I didn’t answer.

“You OK?”

“Are Vassell and Coomer talking?”

She shook her head. “They haven’t said a word. JAG Corps is flying them to Washington tonight. They’ve been assigned lawyers.”

“There’s something wrong,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s been way too easy.”

I thought for a moment.

“We need to get back to Bird,” I said. “Right now.”

Franz lentme fifty bucks and gave me two blank travel vouchers. I signed them and Leon Garber countersigned them even though he was thousands of miles away in Korea. Then Franz drove us back to LAX. He used a staff car because his Humvee was full of Marshall’s blood. Traffic was light and it was a fast trip. We went in and I swapped the vouchers for seats on the first flight to D.C. I checked my bag. I didn’t want to carry it this time. We took off at three o’clock in the afternoon. We had been in California eight hours exactly.