by Lee Child
The suburban streets were neat and clean. There were discreet stores with apartments above them. The store windows were full of shiny items. Street signs were black-on-white, written in an archaic script that made them hard to read. There were small U.S. Army road signs here and there too. You couldn’t go very far without seeing one. We followed the XII Corps arrows, getting closer all the time. We left the built-up area and drove through a couple of kilometers of farmland. It felt like a moat. Like insulation. The eastern sky ahead of us was dark.
XII Corps was based in a typical glory-days installation. Some Nazi industrialist had built a thousand-acre factory site out in the fields, back in the 1930s. It had featured an impressive home office building and ranks of low metal sheds stretching hundreds of meters behind it. The sheds had been bombed to twisted shards, over and over again. The home office building had been only partially damaged. Some weary U.S. Army armored division had set up camp in it in 1945. Thin Frankfurt women in headscarves and faded print dresses had been brought in to pile the rubble, in exchange for food. They worked with wheelbarrows and shovels. Then the Army Corps of Engineers had fixed up the office building and bulldozed the piles of rubble away. Successive huge waves of Pentagon spending had rolled in. By 1953 the place was a flagship installation. There was cleaned brick and shining white paint and a strong perimeter fence. There were flagpoles and sentry boxes and guard shacks. There were mess halls and a medical clinic and a PX. There were barracks and workshops and warehouses. Above all there were a thousand acres of flat land and by 1953 it was covered with American tanks. They were all lined up, facing east, ready to roll out and fight for the Fulda Gap.
When we got there thirty-seven years later it was too dark to see much. But I knew that nothing fundamental would have changed. The tanks would be different, but that would be all. The M4 Shermans that had won World War Two were long gone, except for two fine examples standing preserved outside the main gate, one on each side, like symbols. They were placed halfway up landscaped concrete ramps, noses high, tails low, like they were still in motion, breasting a rise. They were lit up theatrically. They were beautifully painted, glossy green, with bright white stars on their sides. They looked much better than they had originally. Behind them was a long driveway with white-painted curbs and the floodlit front of the office building, which was now the post headquarters. Behind that would be the tank lagers, with M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks lined up shoulder to shoulder, hundreds of them, at nearly four million bucks apiece.
We got out of the taxi and crossed the sidewalk and headed for the main gate guard shack. My special unit badge got us past it. It would get us past any U.S. Army checkpoint anywhere except the inner ring of the Pentagon. We carried our bags down the driveway.
“Been here before?” Summer asked me.
I shook my head as I walked.
“I’ve been in Heidelberg with the infantry,” I said. “Many times.”
“Is that near?”
“Not far,” I said.
There were broad stone steps leading up to the doors. The whole place looked like a capitol building in some small state back home. It was immaculately maintained. We went up the steps and inside. There was a soldier at a desk just behind the doors. Not an MP. Just a XII Corps office grunt. We showed him our IDs.
“Your VOQ got space for us?” I asked.
“Sir, no problem,” he said.
“Two rooms,” I said. “One night.”
“I’ll call ahead,” he said. “Just follow the signs.”
He pointed to the back of the hallway. There were more doors there that would lead out into the complex. I checked my watch. It said noon exactly. It was still set to East Coast time. Six in the evening, in West Germany. Already dark.
“I need to see your MP XO,” I said. “Is he still in his office?”
The guy used his phone and got an answer. Pointed us up a broad staircase to the second floor.
“On your right,” he said.
We went up the stairs and turned right. There was a long corridor with offices on both sides. They had hardwood doors with reeded glass windows. We found the one we wanted and went in. It was an outer chamber with a sergeant in it. It was pretty much identical to the one back at Bird. Same paint, same floor, same furniture, same temperature, same smell. Same coffee, in the same standard-issue machine. The sergeant was like plenty I had seen before too. Calm, efficient, stoic, ready to believe he ran the place all by himself, which he probably did. He was behind his desk and he looked up at us as we came in. Spent half a second deciding who we were and what we wanted.
“I guess you need the major,” he said.
I nodded. He picked up his phone and buzzed through to the inner office.
“Go straight through,” he said.
We went in through the inner door and I saw a desk with a guy called Swan behind it. I knew Swan pretty well. Last time I had seen him was in the Philippines, three months earlier, when he was starting a tour of duty that was scheduled to last a year.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You got here December twenty-ninth.”
“Froze my ass off,” he said. “All I had was Pacific gear. Took XII Corps three days to find me a winter uniform.”
I wasn’t surprised. Swan was short, and wide. Almost cubic. He probably owned a percentile all his own, on the quartermasters’ charts.
“Your Provost Marshal here?” I said.
He shook his head. “Temporarily reassigned.”
“Garber signed your orders?”
“Allegedly.”
“Figured it out yet?”
“Not even close.”
“Me either,” I said.
He shrugged, like he was saying, Hey, the army, what can you do?
“This is Lieutenant Summer,” I said.
“Special unit?” Swan said.
Summer shook her head.
“But she’s cool,” I said.
Swan stretched a short arm over his desk and they shook hands.
“I need to see a guy called Marshall,” I said. “A major. Some kind of a XII Corps staffer.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“Someone is. I’m hoping Marshall will help me figure out who. You know him?”
“Never heard of him,” Swan said. “I only just got here.”
“I know,” I said. “December twenty-ninth.”
He smiled and gave me the What can you do? shrug again and picked up his phone. I heard him ask his sergeant to find Marshall and tell him I wanted to see him at his convenience. I looked around while we waited for the response. Swan’s office looked borrowed and temporary, just like mine did back in North Carolina. It had the same kind of clock on the wall. Electric, no second hand. No tick. It said ten minutes past six.
“Anything happening here?” I said.
“Not much,” Swan said. “Some helicopter guy went shopping in Heidelberg and got run over. And Kramer died, of course. That’s shaken things up some.”
“Who’s next in line?”
“Vassell, I guess.”
“I met him,” I said. “Wasn’t impressed.”
“It’s a poisoned chalice. Things are changing. You should hear these guys talk. They’re real gloomy.”
“The status quo is not an option,” I said. “That’s what I’m hearing.”
His phone rang. He listened for a minute and put it down.
“Marshall’s not on-post,” he said. “He’s out on a night exercise in the countryside. Back in the morning.”
Summer glanced at me. I shrugged.
“Have dinner with me,” Swan said. “I’m lonely here with all these cavalry types. The O Club in an hour?”
We carried our bags over to the Visiting Officers’ Quarters and found our rooms. Mine looked pretty much the same as the one Kramer had died in, except it was cleaner. It was a standard American motel layout. Presumably some hotel chain had bid for the government contract, way back when. Then they had airfreighted all th
e fixtures and fittings, right down to the sinks and the towel rails and the toilet bowls.
I shaved and took a shower and dressed in clean BDUs. Knocked on Summer’s door fifty-five minutes into Swan’s hour. She opened up. She looked clean and fresh. Behind her the room looked the same as mine, except it already smelled like a woman’s. There was some kind of nice eau de toilette in the air.
The O Club occupied half of one of the ground floor wings of the main building. It was a grand space, with high ceilings and intricate plaster moldings. There was a lounge, and a bar, and a dining room. We found Swan in the bar. He was with a lieutenant colonel who was wearing Class As with a combat infantryman’s badge on the coat. It was an odd thing to see, on an Armored post. His nameplate said: Simon. He introduced himself to us. I got the feeling he was going to join us for dinner. He told us he was a liaison officer, working on behalf of the infantry. He told us there was an Armored guy down in Heidelberg, doing the same job in reverse.
“Been here long?” I asked him.
“Two years,” he said, which I was glad about. I needed some background, and Swan didn’t have it, any more than I knew anything about Fort Bird. Then I realized it was no accident that Simon was joining the party. Swan must have figured out what I wanted and set about providing it without being asked. Swan was that kind of guy.
“Pleased to meet you, Colonel,” I said, and then I nodded to Swan, like I was saying thanks. We drank cold American beers from tall frosted glasses and then we went through to the dining room. Swan had made a reservation. The steward put us at a table in the corner. I sat where I could watch the whole room at once. I didn’t see anyone I knew. Vassell wasn’t around. Nor was Coomer.
The menu was absolutely standard. We could have been in any O Club in the world. O Clubs aren’t there to introduce you to local cuisine. They’re there to make you feel at home, somewhere deep inside the army’s own interpretation of America. There was a choice of fish or steak. The fish was probably European, but the steak would have been flown in across the Atlantic. Some politician in one of the ranch states would have leveraged a sweet deal with the Pentagon.
We small-talked for a spell. We bitched about pay and benefits. Talked about people we knew. We mentioned Just Cause in Panama. Lieutenant Colonel Simon told us he had been to Berlin two days previously and had gotten himself a chip of concrete from the Wall. Told us he planned to have it encased in a plastic cube. Planned to hand it on down the generations, like an heirloom.
“Do you know Major Marshall?” I asked him.
“Fairly well,” he said.
“Who is he exactly?” I asked.
“Is this official?”
“Not really,” I said.
“He’s a planner. A strategist, basically. Long-term kind of guy. General Kramer seemed to like him. Always kept him close by, made him his intelligence officer.”
“Does he have an intelligence background?”
“Not formally. But he’ll have done rotations, I’m sure.”
“So is he a part of the inner team? I heard Kramer and Vassell and Coomer mentioned all in the same breath, but not Marshall.”
“He’s on the team,” Simon said. “That’s for sure. But you know what flag officers are like. They need a guy, but they aren’t about to admit it. So they abuse him a little. He fetches and carries and drives them around, but when push comes to shove they ask his opinion.”
“Is he going to move up now Kramer’s gone? Maybe into Coomer’s slot?”
Simon made a face. “He should. He’s an Armor fanatic to the core, like the rest of them. But nobody really knows what the hell is going to happen. Kramer dying couldn’t have come at a worse time for them.”
“The world is changing,” I said.
“And what a world it was,” Simon said. “Kramer’s world, basically, beginning to end. He graduated the Point in Fifty-two, and places like this one were all buttoned up by Fifty-three, and they’ve been the center of the universe for almost forty years. These places are so dug in, you wouldn’t believe it. You know who has done the most in this country?”
“Who?”
“Not Armored. Not the infantry. This theater is all about the Army Corps of Engineers. Sherman tanks way back weighed thirty-eight tons and were nine feet wide. Now we’re all the way up to the M1A1 Abrams, which weighs seventy tons and is eleven feet wide. Every step of the way for forty years the Corps of Engineers has had work to do. They’ve widened roads, hundreds of miles of them, all over West Germany. They’ve strengthened bridges. Hell, they’ve built roads and bridges. Dozens of them. You want a stream of seventy-ton tanks rolling east to battle, you better make damn sure the roads and bridges can take it.”
“OK,” I said.
“Billions of dollars,” Simon said. “And of course, they knew which roads and bridges to look at. They knew where we were starting, and they knew where we were going. They talked to the war-gamers, they looked at the maps, and they got busy with the concrete and the rebar. Then they built way stations everywhere we needed them. Permanent hardened fuel stores, ammunition dumps, repair shops, hundreds of them, all along strictly predetermined routes. So we’re embedded here, literally. We’re dug in, literally. The Cold War battlefields are literally set in stone, Reacher.”
“People are going to say we invested and we won.”
Simon nodded. “And they’d be correct. But what comes next?”
“More investment,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “Like in the Navy, when the big battleships were superseded by aircraft carriers. The end of one era, the beginning of the next. The Abrams tanks are like battleships. They’re magnificent, but they’re out-of-date. About the only way we can use them is down custom-built roads in directions we’ve already planned to go.”
“They’re mobile,” Summer said. “Like any tank.”
“Not very mobile,” Simon said. “Where is the next fight going to be?”
I shrugged. I wished Joe was there. He was good at all the geopolitical stuff.
“The Middle East?” I said. “Iran or Iraq, maybe. They’ve both gotten their breath back, they’ll be looking for the next thing to do.”
“Or the Balkans,” Swan said. “When the Soviets finally collapse, there’s a forty-five-year-old pressure cooker waiting for the lid to come off.”
“OK,” Simon said. “Look at the Balkans, for instance. Yugoslavia, maybe. That’ll be the first place anything happens, for sure. Right now they’re just waiting for the starting gun. What do we do?”
“Send in the Airborne,” Swan said.
“OK,” Simon said again. “We send in the 82nd and the 101st. Lightly armed, we might get three battalions there inside a week. But what do we do after we get there? We’re speed bumps, that’s all, nothing more. We have to wait for the heavy units. And that’s the first problem. An Abrams tank weighs seventy tons. Can’t airlift it. Got to put it on a train, and then put it on a ship. And that’s the good news. Because you don’t just ship the tank. For every ton of tank, you have to ship four tons of fuel and other equipment. These suckers get a half-mile to the gallon. And you need spare engines, ammunition, huge maintenance crews. The logistics tail is a mile long. Like moving an iron mountain. To ship enough tank brigades to make a worthwhile difference, you’re looking at a six-month buildup, minimum, and that’s working right around the clock.”
“During which time the Airborne troops are deep in the shit,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Simon said. “And those are my boys, and I worry about them. Lightly armed paratroops against any kind of foreign armor, we’d get slaughtered. It would be a very, very anxious six months. And it gets worse. Because what happens when the heavy brigades eventually get there? What happens is, they roll off the ships and they get bogged down two blocks later. Roads aren’t wide enough, bridges aren’t strong enough, they never make it out of the port area. They sit there stuck in the mud and watch the infantry getting killed far away in the
distance.”
Nobody spoke.
“Or take the Middle East,” Simon said. “We all know Iraq wants Kuwait back. Suppose they go there? Long term, it’s an easy win for us, because the open desert is pretty much the same for tanks as the steppes in Europe, except it’s a little hotter and dustier. But the war plans we’ve got will work out just fine. But do we even get that far? We’ve got the infantry sitting there like tiny little speed bumps for six whole months. Who says the Iraqis won’t roll right over them in the first two weeks?”
“Air power,” Summer said. “Attack helicopters.”
“I wish,” Simon said. “Planes and whirlybirds are sexy as hell, but they don’t win anything on their own. Never have, never will. Boots on the ground is what wins things.”
I smiled. Part of that was a combat infantryman’s standard-issue pride. But part of it was true too.
“So what’s going to happen?” I asked.
“Same thing as happened with the Navy in 1941,” Simon said. “Overnight, battleships were history and carriers were the new thing. So for us, now, we need to integrate. We need to understand that our light units are too vulnerable and our heavy units are too slow. We need to ditch the whole light-heavy split. We need integrated rapid-response brigades with armored vehicles lighter than twenty tons and small enough to fit in the belly of a C-130. We need to get places faster and fight smarter. No more planning for set-piece battles between herds of dinosaurs.”