Combat

by Stephen Coonts

“Wheeling, West Virginia, ma’am.”

  She nodded. “Wheeling is very beautiful.”

  That was news to Green. “Ever been to the states, Daniela?”

  She shook her head. A decided no. “But I know it is beautiful, and the people are very happy. Except for the Negroes, who are in the cities. Are there Negroes in Wheeling?”

  “Some.”

  “Are you afraid of them?”

  “Not particularly.”

  She considered that. “I think they are violent people. I do not like violent people.”

  “Not all blacks are violent,” Green began. “In America—” He caught himself. It was hardly the time or place for Race Relations 101. “Anyway, Wheeling’s not the most beautiful city in the United States. But there’s pretty country nearby.”

  “I think it must be beautiful. I would like to see it very much.”

  The conversation went dead for a moment. Then Frankie brought the coffee, brewed by invisible hands in a back room. It smelled like instant. But even that was a rare treasure in these parts. In the capital city, though, the war had brought wealth to a new class and you could get espresso, which was the new name for the Turkish coffee that had been brewed in the region for centuries. In the capital city, there were late-night cafes and discos, all smoke and loud Euro-pop, where young men with sleek black hair wore suits with padded shoulders, and the women, faces bitter as coffee grounds, wore short dresses and brutal high heels. Everybody had a deal in the works.

  Daniela lit another cigarette before she drank. “Thank you. I think you are a gentleman. Perhaps you are married?”

  Green smiled at the transparency of the question. These were direct times.

  “No. Not married.”

  “Then, perhaps, you are divorced?” She pronounced the last word with three syllables.

  “Nope. Never married.”

  “That is very strange, I think. And you are an officer?”

  “Yes.” I am an officer. And, yes, it’s very strange. And I would have married Caroline, and she would have married me, and it was all very beautiful when she flew over to visit and we went to Italy, but it was not beautiful enough. Because she would not give up her career for me, and I would not leave the Army for her. And that was love at the end of the century.

  “Why have you never been married?”

  She leaned toward him, cigarette between the fingers of her closed fist, head leaned against her wrist. Green wished he could wash the makeup from her face. She was very pretty, maybe beautiful in the way it took a little while to see. It was sad because he sensed she had put on the makeup, which she would have hoarded, especially for him. She made him feel lonelier than he had felt in months.

  “Just never found the right woman,” he said. “I’m a challenge.”

  She was not having any of that. “Perhaps this woman will find you,” she said firmly. “I think you are a lucky man. You are looking to me like a lucky man.”

  By local standards, Green figured, he was very lucky, indeed.

  “You are living in the capital?” she said. She sipped her coffee with the daintiness of a cat.

  “When I’m not on the road.”

  “You have been there long?”

  “Just over two months.”

  “You will stay for a long time?”

  “I’m on a six-month TDY.”

  She put down the cup, which was chipped around the rim, and looked at him quizzically.

  “It means I’m a loaner model. Only temporary. Six months.”

  She thought about that. “Six months is very long sometimes. I think time is longer in the winter than in the summer. Do you have a girlfriend in the capital?”

  Green wanted to be serious, but he could not help smiling.

  “No girlfriend.”

  “You do not think our girls are pretty?” Another cat-sip of coffee.

  “Very pretty. But I haven’t had much time off.”

  “I went to university there. If I lived there now, I would show you everything.”

  He almost said, “Maybe you’ll get up there sometime,” but stopped himself. He did not want her to read it as an invitation. But he did not want her to leave the table, either.

  “It seems like a pleasant city,” Green lied. With its obese Habsburg architecture, and its fierce grayness, and the leaden food. The people looked down as they walked, and only the whores and hustlers met your eyes.

  “Do you know the cathedral?”

  Green nodded. He had gone there, a dutiful tourist. The ornamentation had seemed squalid and fussy at the same time.

  “I think it is beautiful,” she said.

  “Are you religious?”

  She laughed for the first time. If sound had color, her laugh would have been amber. “Oh, no,” she said. “Only the old people are religious now.”

  “And the people who made the war?”

  Her mouth began to twitch again. It was a slight movement, but he could tell that it shamed her. She did not laugh this time.

  “They have no religion. For them it is only words. It is an excuse they make.”

  “Would you like another coffee?”

  She shook her head. “I think it is very expensive. One cup is enough, you see.”

  “Daniela … what’s your last name? Your family name?”

  “Kortach. And yours?”

  “Green. Jeff Green. Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  She smiled and stared off to the side of his face. “Zelen. That is ‘green’ in our language. Zelen.”

  He nodded. Really, he was the one who needed to practice his language skills. But he was tired. And the girl was lovely. And she did not seem to be a hooker. Just another soul washed up and stranded by the war.

  You could not let yourself get too close. But it was difficult sometimes.

  “I think I must go now,” she said. “It has become late. And this is not a good place for a woman. The people in the village … they are not open of mind like the city people. They think bad things.”

  “You should go then.”

  The words saddened her. He had only meant to be polite, but had said the wrong thing.

  She touched her fingers to the side of her mouth. “How long will you stay in Melnica?”

  “We go back tomorrow.”

  She seemed to shrink into her sweater. As if he had slapped her and she was cowering under the threat of the next blow. He made her for a lonely girl desperate for any chance to get out. Suffocating here. With her memories of books and the greater world. Willing to risk her reputation for a slim chance of escape, in a place where reputation still mattered in a way it had not mattered for a century in his own country.

  “Perhaps you will come again,” she said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then you will visit with me. To practice English.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope very much that you will come again.”

  She stood up. He stood, as well. Old manners. And the miseries of West Point, with its fascist etiquette.

  She thrust out her hand to show she was a Western girl. He took it, and let go too soon. Afraid of himself, of doing something foolish. Even if she was a fairy-tale princess, he was in no position to play Prince Charming. A ghost of warmth remained in his grip.

  She turned away and he called, “Daniela?”

  But he only wanted to give her the rest of the pack of cigarettes to take along.

  “I don’t smoke,” he explained.

  Her eyelids fluttered. Too quickly. “I think that is good, not to smoke” she said, turning away again.

  She didn’t just leave. She fled.

  Crawley came over to the table and repossessed his seat. He looked at Green through the veil of smoke the woman had left behind.

  “Don’t go native on me,” the NCO said.

  The men at the bar laughed over their own little joke. You could hear the liquor level in their voices. Frankie came over to the table and stood before the two Amer
icans. But he only looked at Green.

  “You like her?”

  “She’s a pretty girl,” Green said cautiously.

  Frankie grunted. “She’s a fucking nutcase. They got her during the war. Gang bang.” He punched his fist rhythmically into his palm. “Twelve, fifteen of them.” He laughed. “Hell, maybe a hundred. They kept her up in the woods for a couple of days. Now she’s the town slut. Would’ve been better if they’d cut her throat.”

  Green looked down at the tabletop. The last of the smoke curled and drifted.

  “Hey,” Frankie said, “you want to fuck her? I’ll send her to your room. You can both fuck her. Won’t even cost nothing.”

  “Life sucks, then you die,” Crawley said. He sat on his bed checking his 9mm. The oiled-paper blinds were drawn down as far as they would go. A light bulb hung from the ceiling. Commo gear and everything else that could be removed from the Jeep covered the floor between the old iron beds. “Those sausages are doing a number on my stomach. What the hell kind of peppers do they put in them?”

  Green was not in a talking mood.

  Finally, the NCO laid the pistol on the blanket. “Look, boss man. I’ve been around the block. I understand the mope you got on, all right? A good-looking woman all cozy at your table, batting her eyes and getting all soulful with you. Then you find out her life’s gone off the rails. Way off. And now you don’t want to take her home to meet your parents anymore. But you feel bad about feeling that way, ’cause we’re all supposed to be sensitive New-Age guys or something, and, yeah, she got dealt a bad hand.” He slapped his palms down on his knees. “Well, let me tell you something. Life ain’t fair. If it was, you’d feel as sorry for some pot-bellied creepo as you do for the Sweetheart of the Balkans. But you don’t, and I don’t. And nobody else will, either.”

  The sergeant clicked his tongue in a parody of shame. “When they packed my ass off to eastern Zaire—that one really got to me. Not for the right reasons, though. Much as I hate to admit it, those people didn’t seem real. Not the way your blondie does. Oh, they smelled real enough. Cholera ain’t no air freshener. But even the little kids. In my brain I knew they were human just like me, but it didn’t move me the way it should have. Not the way American kids would’ve done. And you know what really flipped me out? This black captain honchoing our A-team? He had the same goddamned reaction. Couldn’t relate to people in funny clothes talking mumbo-jumbo and crapping themselves to death. And that’s how we get along. There’s plenty of suffering out there. We could just about start a genocide-of-the-month club. So we’re kind of programmed to pick and choose. And you’ve got to do it that way. Sometimes you just have to turn your back. Because there’s so much suffering it’ll just rip you to shreds if you let it. And if you try to fix everything, you end up fixing nothing. So stay in your lane. And be prepared to keep on marching past other people’s misery.”

  Green snapped the clip back into his own pistol. You didn’t make a big thing of it, but you did not go unarmed into Indian country. “Rack time? Listen … Bob … maybe I’m not the right man for this. I mean, that grave today. The little kid who looked like a piece of beef jerky. Then the girl, on top of everything else. My feelings do get in the way. It’s sloppy, I know it. Intellectually, I understand. But I can’t help it, goddamn it. And I’m not sure I want to help it. Maybe I’m not the right guy for this mission.”

  “There is no ‘right guy,’” Crawley said. “You’ll get over it. You get calluses where you need them.” He laughed to himself, a rusty-pipes sound. “Want to turn off that light?”

  “Door locked?”

  “Door’s locked, I’m locked and loaded, and the carburetor’s under the bed. I would’ve taken off the tires, major, sir, but it was raining and I’m delicate.”

  “Screw off, Crawley.”

  “Sweet dreams, Romeo.”

  But Green did not have any dreams at all. He lay awake for a time, thinking unhappily about the woman, then disgusted about the way he found himself thinking of her. He decided that Crawley was probably right, that every emotion was driven by biology. But he could not make himself accept the idea. He recognized that there was something cheap and selfish—too easy—about his sense of sorrow, but he still believed it would be worse to feel nothing at all. And he figured Crawley felt more than he was willing to let on. You couldn’t go through this and feel nothing. Then Green thought of the woman—Daniela—again. He expected bad dreams. But it had been a long day and when he fell asleep there was nothing on his channel.

  The first blast shook the walls and woke him. After a stunned instant, he heard Crawley yell, “Get down,” and he rolled off the bed.

  He landed on the commo gear and pack frames, all knees and elbows and a thin t-shirt. Then he remembered to reach back under the pillow and grab the pistol. The next explosion hit close, but they got lucky. The concussion shattered the windows without blowing them in, and the blinds channeled the falling glass.

  “Fuck me to tears,” Crawley said. “Mortars. Fuck me to tears.”

  “You all right?”

  The night was black between the flashes.

  Green felt the NCO reaching over him and smelled the man’s familiar smell. Then the mattress from his bed fell on him.

  Crawley was tucking him in.

  “Just stay down,” the sergeant said. “I’ve been through this shit before.”

  This time, Green heard the whistling before the impact.

  Close

  The floor shook and the remaining glass blew out. Stings pierced his socks, down where the mattress did not reach.

  “What—”

  “They know we’re here,” Crawley whispered. “This ain’t no accidental timing. Let’s hope they’re just saying hello.”

  A woman’s voice shrieked in the distance. Instantly, Green thought of Daniela. But he made himself focus on business again. He was shaking. But he was ready to go, to move, to act. He just wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Get your gear on, sir,” Crawley told him. “Jeans, boots, jacket. In case we have to run. You hear any more whistling, get back under that mattress.”

  Green fumbled in the darkness. He had positioned his jeans at the bottom of the bed so he could find them easily. But pulling off the mattress had made a mess of that plan.

  Then they heard the shots.

  “Oh, shit,” Crawley said.

  The shouting began.

  “You think this is about us?” Green rasped. He had his jeans now, feeling for the leg holes.

  “I know it’s about us. I just don’t know what they’re out to prove. We need to un-ass this place.”

  A smaller explosion sounded nearby. Grenade. Then the automatic weapons fire kicked in again. The screaming resumed, and there were male shouts now. Green yanked on his hiking boots. His fingers were unsteady. But they did as they were told.

  “Maybe something about that grave,” Crawley said. “I don’t—”

  Something struck the wall inside the room. It was a flat sound, followed by the clang of metal on metal.

  “Shit,” Crawley yelled. Then he landed on top of Green, covering the major’s body with his own, barrel chest grinding Green’s head into the floor.

  The grenade’s blast lifted the sergeant away and stunned Green. He did not even know if he was wounded. He felt as though he had been thumped on every side of his head at once. There was an avalanche in his ears. His body was numb. Then he tasted salt and wet, and sensed the pulsing from his nose.

  He could not move, but did not know what that meant. Time warped and would not go forward.

  “Bob?”

  The sound of his own voice seemed slow to Green. It lingered in the air, surrounded by a bronze roar. In another world, automatic weapons continued to fire. Rounds struck metal. He imagined he was inside a big metal room. There was laughter.

  His head hurt. It was so bad his mouth stayed open in a scream without sound. He imagined his skull shrinking, squeezing his brain.

&nb
sp; The door swung open. Green wanted to rise, to defend himself. But his body would not move. He could think again. But none of his parts would go. He wondered if that meant he had been paralyzed. The thought stunned him.

  Boots. Rampaging through the room. He only realized his eyes were open when a flashlight found them. His neck muscles recoiled.

  “On zhiv.” The voice seemed pleased and angry at the same time. He heard it over the enormous, constant ringing. “On zhiv.”

  Zhiv. Alive. That was him. A string of obscenities followed.

  Suddenly, his arm moved. Without his command. Or maybe he had intended to move it a long time before. Somebody inside him, a ghost from a previous life, reached for the pistol.

  A boot came down on his forearm.

  Whatever else he had lost, he had not lost his language skills. He understood the words, “American scum.”

  “Bob?” he called again. It was hard to keep focus. “Sergeant Crawley?”

  He had to spit the blood from his mouth. Gagging.

  Outside the cabin, a man laughed again. A woman’s wail colored the distance.

  Rough hands yanked Green to his feet. To his astonishment, he found he could stand. But the darkness would not hold still and he nearly toppled. The sound in his ears rolled and rolled. Instinctively, he raised a hand to wipe the slime from his mouth and chin, but a gunbarrel forced the hand back down.

  Someone threw something at him, shouting. He had been unprepared. The object—heavy fabric—hit his chest and fell.

  The skull. He remembered the skull.

  The voice commanded him to pick up the object and put it on. It was his jacket.

  That was when he realized they were not going to kill him right away.

  Someone thumped him between the shoulder blades and told him to get outside. Green stumbled toward the different darkness. Dizzy. Nauseated. The air was damp and cold, with the smell of a rifle range. His ears still pushed sounds away, making them small and hard to hear. But he could see clearly.

  Where was Crawley?

  Dark figures in masks. A fire in a house beyond the inn.

  Green bent and hacked up the blood he had swallowed. Then he wiped his face with his hand. No one stopped him this time.

  The Jeep rested on flattened tires, shot up. The vehicle’s armor was light, intended to stop assassins with pistols and sloppy shooters during a drive-by, and really all it meant was that you could not roll the windows down. Now the Cherokee looked like a butchered animal.