Джанет Моррис - The 40-Minute War

When a big-eared fellow with no neck and his hair shaved almost to the skin said with a grin, “Yes, Sir, Mac, what’ll it be?” the SEAL commander turned to Chris Patrick.

“Hold out your hand, Miss Patrick.”

Ashmead held his breath but Chris extended her right, not her left with the watch clasped to it.

Mac asked her to squeeze his hand as hard as she could and then to try to hold his hand down as he raised it so that he could assess the strength in her wrist.

Then he turned back to the ordnance clerk: “Give me a Detonics Mark VI in nine millimeter, and a Galco Jak-Slide… cross-draw, I guess.”

“Right,” the clerk was filling out the form: “Jak- Slide 2 holster.” He looked up inquiringly, waiting for the rest.

“What’s your waist size, Miss Patrick?”

“Chris; call me Chris. It’s… ah… twenty-four,” she said.

Behind her, Slick leaned an elbow on the counter, grinning fondly at her.

“Twenty- four ?” Mac rubbed his neck and told the clerk: “Give me the smallest Gelco belt you’ve got and a hole-puncher, two spare magazines in a Seventrees magnetic holder, an Aim-Point that’ll fit and a mounting kit, and three boxes of Glaser DU.”

The clerk looked with a pained expression at Ashmead’s team. “Sir, you know we don’t have any DU—”

“Mister, this man,” he gestured to Ashmead, “has a security clearance with four T’s in front of the S. Let’s not play ‘I’ve Got a Secret.’” He turned to Ashmead: “You still carrying that SIG in.45, Rafic?”

“Yep,” Ashmead said. “We’re all standardized as to caliber.”

“Good enough. Add five boxes of DU.45ACP, and that’ll be it.”

“If you say so, Sir,” said the clerk doubtfully; he was still shaking his head as he disappeared between the tall rows of shelves to his rear.

Mac leaned on the counter facing the team: “DU’s still classified, Miss Patrick, but under the circumstances your word will be a sufficient guarantee.”

Chris looked at him with a dazed expression: “I have no idea what you’re talking about, any of it. I’ve never shot a gun… I just bought that one when I realized suicide might be a viable alternative to… to…” She bit her lip. “So I’m going to look pretty foolish in front of all of you.”

“Don’t worry about it. Everybody starts sometime,” Mac assured her avuncularly. “You’re getting a cross-draw with no thumb-release strap because you’re a beginner and we don’t want you to shoot yourself when you draw fast; and if you can’t punch paper without it, we’ll mount the Aim-Point—it’s a scope that puts a red dot on the target so that you can’t miss, as long as you can hold your weapon steady with the extra weight.”

“Aim-Points are for old guys whose eyes are failing so they can’t focus on three things at once,” Slick told her. “You won’t need it.”

And, on the outdoor range, under Ashmead’s tutelage, she proved she didn’t, once they’d gotten around the problem of her small waist and the curve outward below to her hips.

While she stood at the firing line with Thoreau and Slick, all three wearing ear protectors over their white radiation hoods, and shot paper bull’s-eyes at twenty-five yards, Ashmead and Mac sat in Mac’s hardened staff car with one eye on the clock: “I don’t want them out in this three-Rem wind more than another few minutes,” Ashmead said, jingling spent brass in his palm from his own trial firing of the DU. “So let’s get serious.”

“What do you want to know, Rafic?” Mac turned sideways behind the wheel and met his gaze.

“Why Beggs and Watkins are so anxious to cut Patrick out of my herd—you’re not going to grease those dips, are you?”

“I’ve no orders to that effect at present,” the Navy commando leader said levelly, “but you never can tell.”

“I want to take her home with me in one piece.”

“Then keep her with you. It’s nasty out there—not the radiation so much, but the public mood. Civilians…” His mouth twisted. “We’ve got the National Guard out trying to get the wrecks off the roads, and our citizens are looting everything in sight as well as sniping at those of us who’re trying to help them. You’d think we were the enemy. They’ll kill each other for a priority placement in a Medevac line or a hospital bed or even a pound of rice or a jug of bottled water. No discipline, no morality. There’s just not enough standing army to maintain order, and the local cops are as bad as the people they’re supposed to be policing. It may calm down now that they’ve got their telephones and TV reception back—it took us too long to get something like a network with regular programming and controllable news up and running. They felt cut off, I guess. Scared. And the Emergency Broadcast Network—when and where it functioned—didn’t help much. All you need is a couple hysterics and it spreads like chemical warfare.”

Ashmead could see Mac’s frustration; every soldier fears anarchy more than death. “Keep her with us, you said. Any idea how I might be able to do that without disobeying a direct Presidential order?”

Mac cocked his head, “Did you hear an order like that? In all the commotion, you must have been mistaken.” His teeth flashed: “From the heart, Rafic: do what you damn well please where, in your judgment, national interest isn’t at stake. What we’ve got left of an Administration doesn’t know its best interest from a latrine. If I were you I’d get in that P-3B and haul ass back where I came from with what’s left of that team of yours and do what you know how to do: covert action includes dropping right out of the picture, doesn’t it?”

“Could be. Want to join us?”

“I’d truly love to, but I’ve got too many boys to look after and I can’t bring them all with me. What the hell happened, anyway? You don’t make mistakes like the one that fried Home Plate.”

“That’s right, I don’t. But other people do. I followed an order I should have ignored because I’d been taking a lot of heat over insubordination.”

Mac was looking out the window now, binoculars up to his eyes, “Damn, but that Slick can shoot.”

“You should have seen Jesse.” Ashmead, too, looked out at Slick’s white-suited figure limned against the new spring grass of the outdoor range, the horizon distant and empty beyond him. Empty was about how Ashmead felt: the loss of Elint, Jesse and Yael was something he’d come to terms with later. Maybe it was for the best, kinder; maybe Morse’s serum wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It certainly wasn’t going to be efficacious against the sort of radiation hazard they’d be exposed to in Georgetown. But, like Slick and Thoreau, Ashmead had to believe that the sacrifices were worth the price.

“I heard,” Mac was saying. “Did you train him?”

“Slick? He trains me, half the time—he’s a natural. Want to rate Watkins’s record for me?”

Mac put down the glasses slowly and shook his head: “I can’t think of a single nice thing to say.”

“Gotcha. That’s what I thought. But what about Watkins and Beck? Why the vendetta? Without Beck, none of you guys would be sitting around rubbing your inoculations.”

“Something happened in Tel Aviv, Beck said. Beyond that, I don’t know anything except that Beggs trusts Watkins like I wouldn’t trust my own mother. It’s like CIA’s running the country—no offense personally, of course.”

“None taken. Suits or no suits, I’m ready to get those kids in out of the wind. Then I’d like to go over the Black Hawks, inside and out, with you.”

“I’ve got my own people standing over them—there won’t be any tampering. Everybody’s so high-tensile, I couldn’t sleep if I’d done it any other way. But you don’t have to take my word for it—I’ll be in one of those birds; I’d as soon get a hands-on, myself, before we take your dips sightseeing. And we don’t have much time.” Mac looked at his watch. “We’re cleared for takeoff in three hours for the first leg.” He started the Lincoln’s engine and looked straight at Ashmead: “When we get to Bragg, there’ll be plenty of time to stage enough of a little mixup that Patrick will end up in your Black Hawk instead of mine—just in case I’m getting complacent in my old age and you’re right about a scratch order coming down.”