“You can’t keep blaming yourself for Tarot’s death.”
“It’s not that, don’t worry. It’s just that I’ve come to an understanding with myself. I’m an operator, you know… “
“That you are. I’d almost call you a ‘trigger puller’ without the trigger.”
Emily frowned at him. “All I know is what I’m good at, flying helos and Ospreys, and fighting when I have to. But command responsibility…”
“Keep talking like that and they’ll make you a SEAL.”
“Yeah, right… that’s what you see me doing?”
“I can picture you doing pretty much anything, sweetheart. But with your language skills… and combat experience, I assumed Admiral Crichton would put you on his staff. Plus, he has a soft spot…”
“… for my father, I know. All I wanted was a straightforward career path, not this crazy quilt where every promotion is the result of a special intervention by someone five or six steps higher. Besides, Lukasziewicz is retiring at the end of the year, and he’s been dropping hints about a place with a consulting firm he means to start.”
“Right, like the one thing I can’t picture you as is a merc.”
“Like you said, it’s my language skills they’d want, not my killing skills.” Emily almost choked on a chunk of bratwurst as she said this last bit.
“You realize I’ve still got fourteen months to go on this tour, and then the next tour back in command of my own SDV team, right?”
“I’m not asking you to retire, honey.” Emily pressed a hand against his cheek. “… and it’s not like we’ve ever managed to get any geographic consideration so far. This way, we might even get to spend more time together.”
Perry shook his head and began to pay more attention to his plate, until she went in search of the restroom, which he warned her might be called a ‘WC’ here. The waitress pointed her to the far end of the bar, where a corridor with a mirrored wall led to the back. He watched Emily pause to consider her reflection, and press a hand against her abdomen – strange behavior for a tomboy or, more precisely, the god of battles he knew her to be.
His thoughts turned to the events of the previous night. She’d emailed instructions for a complex kata, which she called a two-man fist set. “Learn the right half before you get here,” the message said, and he’d taken it for nothing short of a command. Yesterday evening, in the hotel at Ramstein Air Force Base, they pushed the bed into a corner, and even though it was a large room, he had little confidence they could practice without smashing half the furniture.
“Faster,” she’d hissed, when he held his fist by her ear, and his interest in the exercise had begun to flag. “What kind of strike was that? Attack like you mean it.”
“What good is a scripted set of moves? It’s not even realistic.”
“Of course it isn’t. What would be the point of that?”
“… maybe practicing moves that actually work in a real fight.”
Emily had paused to consider his face, his posture, the set of his shoulders, his hips, and he’d felt a little foolish for challenging her on this. A recurrent question presented itself – What on Earth does she see in me? – until she stepped to one side and thrust a hand low, toward his crotch, and the other high, just grazing his cheek. He swung a block down and ducked under her head strike, but before he could counter, she’d already stepped further around his hip, kicked his left foot out from under him, and grabbed his shirt collar.
He remembered trying to right himself, to regain his footing, by leaning forward, and only then recognizing how he’d played into her trap. She’d already grabbed the back of his trousers and twisted him into a sort of flying somersault, which she guided by seizing his wrist – Is she really strong enough to lift me off the ground? He ended up lying half on and half off the bed, his head a few inches from the floor, as he gazed at her upside down. A quick step and a twisting leap – How did that not break the bed? – and she’d landed on top of him, legs straddling his waist. A few awkward grunts and wriggles later, and he managed to adjust his position underneath her.
“I get your point. You think two moves ahead.”
She peered down into his eyes, with that ambiguous smile that could turn so quickly into a frown playing on her lips, and tilted her head to one side. “I don’t think you do.”
“Fine. What is it, then?”
“You’re always complaining that I can tell what you’re going to do before you do. But it’s not because I’m thinking two moves ahead, or even one move ahead. It’s not like that.”
“Is this where you tell me I don’t know how to breathe right?”
“Well… yeah, that’s also true… and you need to work on that. I just thought the paired kata might let you experience what it feels like to know beforehand what someone else is going to do.”
“Oh,” he said, now a little flustered by the simplicity of her thinking. “That makes sense.”
She’d begun kissing him before he could say anything else. Maybe she even meant to stop him talking, which was probably also a good idea. But a noise pulled her away, and before he quite knew what had happened, she’d leapt off the bed, and somehow yanked him face down onto the floor. Just then, the door to the adjoining room swung open and Li Li poked her head in, with Stone looming over her shoulder.
“What’s with all the noise, guys?” Li Li pushed all the way in, and glanced around at the new arrangement of the furniture. “Are you training?”
“We’re not doing anything.”
At that moment, Emily reminded Perry of his own mother, as she mounted this sadly transparent deception, even though these weren’t really her kids. The precise nature of the relationship had never quite been made clear to him. He knew the story, more or less: a rescue, North Korean operatives, some sort of prison facility hidden on the Kamchatka Krai. But the few details he’d gleaned seemed implausible, or were shrouded in an excess of caution, though he could guess that it probably involved a fight to the death. He didn’t want to press her for a clarification.
“Then what was that crash we just heard?”
“Oh, that was nothing…” Perry said, once he’d picked himself up off the floor. “… just me bouncing off the wall.”
Somehow, Emily managed to turn the kids back through the door with what he could only describe as maternal authority. Stone, the immense man-child, was surprisingly docile and obeyed her implicitly. By contrast, Li Li offered the resistance one might expect from a freshly minted teenager. But even she had to comply soon enough.
The couple at the bar leaned their heads together, as if they were whispering, and Perry thought the woman glanced anxiously over one shoulder at him. She seemed somehow familiar, the shape of her nose, and an elegant line along her forearm and wrist. Perhaps her body didn’t quite suit her clothes – not that they fit badly, but she seemed incongruous in them. SEALs are trained to be observant, but after two tours in Afghanistan perhaps he’d lost his sense of how women dress in the west. She’d make more sense in that outfit if she had blond hair. A moment later, she stood up, apparently in a huff, and stepped past the mirrored wall toward the WC, and the man stole a glance at him over one shoulder.
Perry’s imagination was working over time, fabricating something suspicious out of random details. The crowd in the Bierstübe had thinned out, and the light dimmed behind the door to the kitchen, with its porthole window. He glanced at the clock over the bar, which showed half past ten, and wondered if the kids had gone to sleep yet. The base hotel had free cable, so they might still be squabbling over the remote control.
He flashed to that morning, when he’d glimpsed Emily heading out the door in running gear through eyes he’d barely cracked open. Whenever he asked her about it – why she got up so early, even on leave – she’d say something opaque, or absurd, like that she didn’t want ‘Granny’ to get the drop on her. He stumbled into shoes and shorts, but she was nowhere in sight by the time he made the lobby. He’d catch her up
, eventually, since speed wasn’t the virtue of her running, but if it didn’t happen until near the end she’d give him ‘that look.’
Guessing the route she’d take wasn’t difficult, given her preference for nature over any signs of cityscape. She’d bend her steps wide to avoid any glimpse of base housing on the streets named after states: Alabama Boulevard, Oregon Street, etc. He grew impatient when he didn’t catch her in the woods.
“She must be really moving,” he muttered. “What is she playing at?”
On the far side of the wire, she’d have to slow down to cross the Mohrbach at a shallow point opposite Ramstein High School, and circle around a scalene triangle formed by the outer fence to approach the main gate.
As he passed the city pool complex, the protestors came into view, which meant the rally must be sizable to be visible through the trees this early. He hadn’t paid much attention to the security briefing when he arrived last night. Apparently, when the press revealed that drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere were controlled through an uplink at Ramstein, crowds began to descend on the base to voice their displeasure. So far, they’d been peaceful. To Perry’s eye, they looked like a bunch of hippies in tie-dye clothes, who mainly wanted to disrupt traffic. It was a mixed crowd, not just young men, always a combustible element at such events, but women and children, and a few old folks, too.
That must be why she looked familiar, the woman at the bar.
In the crowd, at the center of the trouble this morning, a young woman with strawberry blond pigtails struggled to maneuver a baby stroller through the crowd facing off with the Force Protection unit posted outside the main gate. A black uniform and tactical gear should have made them readily identifiable: Spezialkräfte, on loan from the German Bundeswehr. But whoever they were, it looked like an excessive response to this threat. Because of the outline of the base fences, Perry had to run away from the gate sixty or eighty meters before he could clear the point and turn back. But this gave him a clear view of what happened next.
The crowd chanted something he couldn’t understand, though he assumed it was a general complaint about drone warfare, and a few signboards mentioned Dronen in red letters. It was loud, but hardly threatening, and yet the men in black reacted aggressively, shoving people back from the gate. The woman with the strawberry pigtails had pushed her stroller to the very front, and just as it looked like she might get crushed in the struggle, a rifle butt raised above her head, Emily appeared on the scene.
Perry recognized the moves, even if the Spezialkräfte did not, and to tell the truth, he thought, these guys ought to be ashamed for making themselves vulnerable in the first place, and so unnecessarily. The rifle seemed frozen in the air, and when the Kommando turned to see what the problem was, Emily released the barrel and jabbed him just below the armpit, and once more with two fingers to the soft spot under the chin. One arm fell to the side, limp, and he dropped the rifle, and slumped to his knees, clutching at his throat with the other hand. Two more men rushed to neutralize her – finally, a threat worthy of their armament had materialized. Somehow, she knew how to find the soft spots, even on men wearing body armor, and maybe she’d gotten better at this since her stay in China, though Perry could hardly imagine how. Within seconds, three men had been immobilized, writhing on the ground and not a shot had been fired… yet. The civilians shrank back, desperate to get clear of whatever might happen next, as more men in black moved to surround her.
“No, no, no,” Perry cried out, running now as quickly as he could through the horrified crowd. He waved an ID card and shouted louder, hoping not to get shot himself, since like Emily, he was not in uniform. Meanwhile, Emily stood her ground between the stroller and the Kommandos, eyes alight, glowering at them like one of the furies, and the woman cringed below in her shadow. The American gate guards had taken an interest at this point, and four of them rushed in from the other side, M4s leveled, intentions unclear. “She’s USMC,” he shouted again. “She’s with me. Stand down.”
When one of the guards seemed to recognize him, he barked a command, and his men turned their M4s toward the Kommandos. Defusing this situation required a few minutes, and a touch of bravado from the Americans, but eventually their German counterparts withdrew and American reinforcements arrived in two Humvees.
Placating the base command staff turned out to be a more involved process, and Emily accepted the dressing down she had coming. This dimension of her personality impressed Perry almost as much as her fighting skills. She’d face down armed men with hostile intent, but not take the trouble to defend her actions in front of a superior officer. She’d take the heat for whatever she’d done, no lip, no excuses, and probably do it again the very next day, if she deemed it necessary. In this particular case, however, the heat came from a husky master sergeant, backed by the Colonel who served as Vice-Commander of the 86th Airlift Wing.
“Yes, ma’am,” Emily said.
“We’ve got more important things to do here than clean up after wannabe heroes.” MSgt Gwendolyn Degen continued in a deep southern drawl.
“Another incident I’ll have to smooth over with the Germans,” Col Brickhouse muttered, as he pored over his open laptop. “You’ve seen some action, Captain Tenno, and that’s commendable. But you have to take it down a notch when you’re on leave. You’re not in theater anymore.”
“Yes, sir.”
Afterwards, Perry couldn’t help wondering what Brickhouse had read on that screen. Even Degen was surprised to see how lightly he’d let Emily off, barely a raised voice. Had the Base Commander intervened? Could Lukasziewicz, or maybe Crichton, have already put in a word? But how would they have known to take the trouble, and why would Brickhouse, or his boss, even be interested in their character reference for a troublesome O-3? Whatever it had been, Perry lacked the will to puzzle over it any longer, and he focused on his glass of beer.
This couldn’t be the same woman. Perry was sure of that much, but when he looked up from his reverie, the man from the bar had taken a seat at his table.
“You like what you see, American?”
For whatever reason, these words didn’t register at all, and the heavy accent probably wasn’t the reason. Perry gaped at him. “Uhh… what?”
“The girl, she pleases you? We can come to an arrangement.”
Dumbfounded by the blunt intrusiveness of this proposition, his first instinct was that it felt like some of the interrogation techniques he’d learned in SEAL training. Impose on your prisoner, invade his most personal feelings, disrupt the foundations of his self-image. Sexual insinuations are the stock in trade of the aggressive interrogator. If this thought had come to full expression in his mind, he’d probably have thrown the interloper to the floor and exacted a measure of physical punishment. As it was, he merely stared straight ahead, unfocused, wide-eyed, uncomprehending.
“We have a rate for threesomes, if you prefer,” the man continued, leaning over to reach for a back pocket, perhaps in response to the way Perry flinched at this last suggestion.
Had he been able to focus, Perry would have noticed her approach. But, in his present perplexity, Emily’s sudden appearance seemed stunning, especially when she seized the man’s hand from behind, twisting and raising it to an awkward and painful angle. He squealed when she twisted the tactical baton from his grip and drove him to the floor with a further twist.
When the woman with the black hair shrieked something at Emily and charged across the near empty room, swinging her own baton, Perry grabbed the man’s wrist and crouched down to press a knee into his back. He felt no sidearm, but located a holstered stun gun. Who the hell are these guys? The man growled up at him, his neck twisted back, to say, “Bey Eff Fau,” or something to that effect. “Release me, American. We’re BFV… law enforcement.”
The waitress, who’d been watching these events from behind the bar in the now nearly empty Bierstübe, reached for a mobile phone and began to dial a number before the bartender touched her ha
nd and shook his head. Emily had already disarmed the woman, now holding her by the throat with one hand and preparing to strike with the other, when the black hair slipped to the side, and a bit of close-cropped blond hair peeked out.
“They’re cops, Em. Let her go.”
Perry released the man and stood off him, and Emily let the woman slide from her grasp to the floor.
“Not police,” the man said, dusting himself off. “More like your FBI, I think.”
Emily reached down to massage some feeling back into the woman’s arm and shoulder. “Did you follow us here?”
“You disrupted an operation, Captain Tenno.” She gestured to her partner. “Enough, Dieter. There’s nothing to conceal any longer.”
“You are here under a diplomatic passport,” he said to Emily, with a significant glance at his partner. “But you haven’t registered as a foreign agent.”
“I’m not… I’m in between postings. I’m just traveling with my family.”
The woman cocked an eyebrow. “He’s family? You’ll forgive me, but…”
Emily reached for Perry’s hand. “Almost family.” These words worked a powerful magic on him, and his face felt warm. “… and my kids are back at the base, in our hotel.”
“You’re running an op at Ramstein?” Perry demanded, as soon as he’d managed to bring the conversation back into focus. “Has base security been made aware?” He took some little satisfaction from the perplexed expression on Dieter’s face, now the tables had been turned.
“Well, no… not really on the base.” After a couple of exchanged glances, he nodded and the woman continued.
“We have reports of rightwing extremists in the KSK.”
“KSK?” Emily asked. “Is that your special forces… the force protection units on loan at the main gate?” When the woman nodded, Emily’s shoulders slumped. “So I saved your ass for nothing, then?”
“How could you do something so reckless, if you thought dangerous, heavily armed extremists were involved? To provoke an incident… and for what?” Perry sputtered out this last question, his eyes sharpening as he groped for words. “That’s what it looked like to me. You shoved that stroller to the front just as the crowd grew restless. ”
Girl Stalks the Ruins Page 2