Lee Child - The Enemy

That stuff came on the fourth page.

The fourth page had a curious heading: T.E.P., The Extra Mile . Underneath that was a typed quotation from The Art of War by Sun-tzu: To fail to take the battle to the enemy when your back is to the wall is to perish . Alongside that in the margin was a penciled addendum in what I guessed was Vassell’s handwriting: While coolness in disaster is the supreme proof of a commander’s courage, energy in pursuit is the surest test of his strength of will. Wavell .

“Who’s Wavell?” Summer said.

“An old British field marshal,” I said. “World War Two. Then he was viceroy of India. He was blind in one eye from World War One.”

Underneath the Wavell quote was another penciled note, in a different hand. Coomer’s, probably. It said: Volunteers? Me? Marshall ? Those three words were ringed and connected with a long looping pencil line back to the heading: T.E.P., The Extra Mile .

“What’s that about?” Summer said.

“Read on,” I said.

Below the Sun-tzu quote was a typed list of eighteen names. I knew most of them. There were key battalion commanders from prestige infantry divisions like the 82nd and the 101st, and significant staffers from the Pentagon, and some other people. There was an interesting mix of ages and ranks. There were no really junior officers, but the list wasn’t confined to senior people. Not by any means. There were some rising stars in there. Some obvious choices, some offbeat mavericks. A few of the names meant nothing to me. They belonged to people I had never heard of. There was a guy listed called Abelson, for instance. I didn’t know who Abelson was. He had a penciled check mark against his name. Nobody else did.

“What’s the check mark for?” Summer said.

I dialed my sergeant outside at her desk.

“Ever heard of a guy called Abelson?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.

“Find out about him,” I said. “He’s probably a light colonel or better.”

I went back to the list. It was short, but it was easy enough to interpret. It was a list of eighteen key bones in a massive evolving skeleton. Or eighteen key nerves in a complex neurological system. Remove them, and a certain part of the army would be somewhat handicapped. Today, for sure. But more importantly it would be handicapped tomorrow too. Because of the rising stars. Because of the stunted evolution. And from what I knew about the people whose names I recognized, the part of the army that would get hurt was exclusively the part with the light units in it. More specifically, those light units that looked ahead toward the twenty-first century rather than those that looked backward at the nineteenth. Eighteen people was not a large number, in a million-man army. But it was a superbly chosen sample. There had been some acute analysis going on. Some precision targeting. The movers and the shakers, the thinkers and the planners. The bright stars. If you wanted a list of eighteen people whose presence or absence would make a difference to the future, this was it, all typed and tabulated.

My phone rang. I hit Speaker and we heard my sergeant’s voice.

“Abelson was the Apache helicopter guy,” she said. “You know, the attack helicopters? The gunships? Always beating that particular drum?”

“Was?” I said.

“He died the day before New Year’s Eve. Car versus pedestrian in Heidelberg, Germany. Hit-and-run.”

I clicked the phone off.

“Swan mentioned that,” I said. “In passing. Now that I think about it.”

“The check mark,” Summer said.

I nodded. “One down, seventeen to go.”

“What does T.E.P . mean?”

“It’s old CIA jargon,” I said. “It means terminate with extreme prejudice .”

She said nothing.

“In other words, assassinate,” I said.

We sat quiet for a long, long time. I looked at the ridiculous quotations again. The enemy. When your back is to the wall. The supreme proof of a commander’s courage. The surest test of his strength of will . I tried to imagine what kind of crazy isolated ego-driven fever could drive people to add grandiose quotations like those to a list of men they wanted to murder so they could keep their jobs and their prestige. I couldn’t even begin to figure it out. So I just gave it up and butted the four typewritten sheets back together and threaded the staple back through the original holes. I took an envelope from my drawer and slipped them inside it.

“It’s been out in the world since the first of the year,” I said. “And they knew it was gone for good on the fourth. It wasn’t in the briefcase, and it wasn’t on Brubaker’s body. That’s why they were resigned. They gave up on it a week ago. They killed three people looking for it, but they never found it. So they were just sitting there, knowing for sure sooner or later it was going to come back and bite them in the ass.”

I slid the envelope across the desk.

“Use it,” I told Summer. “Use it in D.C. Use it to nail their damn hides to the wall.”

By thenit was already four o’clock in the morning and Summer left for the Pentagon immediately. I went to bed and got four hours’ sleep. Woke myself up at eight. I had one thing left to do, and I knew for sure there was one thing left to be done to me.

I got to my officeat nine o’clock in the morning. The woman with the baby son was gone by then. The Louisiana corporal had taken her place.

“JAG Corps is here for you,” he said. He jerked his thumb at my inner door. “I let them go straight in.”

I nodded. Looked around for coffee. There wasn’t any. Bad start . I opened my door and stepped inside. Found two guys in there. One of them was in a visitor’s chair. One of them was at my desk. Both of them were in Class As. Both had JAG Corps badges on their lapels. A small gold wreath, crossed with a saber and an arrow. The guy in the visitor’s chair was a captain. The guy at my desk was a lieutenant colonel.

“Where do I sit?” I said.

“Anywhere you like,” the colonel said.

I said nothing.

“I saw the telexes from Irwin,” he said. “You have my sincere congratulations, Major. You did an outstanding job.”

I said nothing.

“And I heard about Kramer’s agenda,” he said. “I just got a call from the Chief of Staff’s office. That’s an even better result. It justifies Operation Argon all by itself.”

“You’re not here to discuss the case,” I said.

“No,” he said. “We’re not. That discussion is happening at the Pentagon, with your lieutenant.”

I took a spare visitor’s chair and put it against the wall, under the map. I sat down on it. Leaned back. Put my hand up over my head and played with the pushpins. The colonel leaned forward and looked at me. He waited, like he wanted me to speak first.

“You planning on enjoying this?” I asked him.

“It’s my job,” he said.

“You like your job?”

“Not all the time,” he said.

I said nothing.

“This case was like a wave on the beach,” he said. “Like a big old roller that washes in and races up the sand, and pauses, and then washes back out and recedes, leaving nothing behind.”

I said nothing.

“Except it did leave something behind,” he said. “It left a big ugly piece of flotsam stuck right there on the waterline, and we have to address it.”

He waited for me to speak. I thought about clamming up. Thought about making him do all the work himself. But in the end I just shrugged and gave it up.

“The brutality complaint,” I said.

He nodded. “Colonel Willard brought it to our attention. And it’s awkward. Whereas the unauthorized use of the travel warrants can be dismissed as germane to the investigation, the brutality complaint can’t. Because apparently the two civilians were completely unrelated to the business at hand.”