Williams pulled a younger man into the circle of power defined by the two colonels. A warrant officer. Fresh-faced kid lugging a briefcase that hardly suited the field environment.
"George, this is my wonder boy, the one who broke the bank. He's all raring to go, just dying to get into the fight." Williams smiled happily at the younger man. "Chief Ryder, this is Colonel Georgie Taylor. The Colonel George Taylor."
"Honored to meet you, sir," the warrant officer said in an absentminded voice, as though he were thinking of things far away. He wavered about offering his hand to Taylor, eyes dwelling on the dirty bandage. But Taylor snared the boy and gave him a welcoming handshake even as he sensed that something was wrong. There was something about the kid, something uncannily familiar . . .
"Welcome to the Seventh Cav," Taylor said.
"So, George?" Williams said. "What's the word? We get the green light?"
"Still waiting," Taylor replied in disgust. "The President's making his decision right now. With the NSC."
"And all the fucking straphangers, I bet," Williams said. He made an exaggeratedly sour face. "Christ, I know one of those sonsofbitches personally, old Cliff Bouquette from the Agency. Talk about a worthless, lying, overdressed piece of shit."
"I'm worried, Tucker."
Williams folded his arms across his big chest, nodding. "Poor old Waters just doesn't have a handle on this stuff. But, what the hell can you expect, when less than five percent of the members of Congress have ever worn a uniform. They read a fucking book by another peckerhead who's never tied on a combat boot, and suddenly they're military reformers. Jesus Christ, the country needs a goddamned draft. Even if it only applies to freshmen congressmen."
Taylor nodded, used to Williams. "I almost thought I had him. I thought he was going to say yes. He seemed on the verge of it."
As he spoke Taylor could not help turning his eyes again and again to Ryder. It was as if he had known him, years before. Yet that was obviously impossible. The warrant officer was too young.
Who the hell did he resemble?
"Chief?" Williams said. "Why don't you head over to the deuce's shop and introduce yourself. Colonel Taylor and I need to talk."
"Yes, sir." Ryder ducked his head slightly in obedience, rendered a halting salute, and moved off in search of the intelligence section.
"Good boy," Williams told Taylor as soon as the warrant was out of earshot. "Computer tech. Absolutely brilliant. Not a field soldier, of course. I'm counting on you to take care of him, Georgie."
Taylor barely responded. His head moved slightly, but it was clear that his thoughts were elsewhere.
"That bad?" Williams asked.
Taylor shrugged. "I don't know." He clenched his hands into fists, bouncing them off each other, a boxer testing his gloves. The discomfort in his burned hand did not even register on him. "Damnit, I thought he was going to give me the go-ahead. Talking about his father and Alabama. Rousing stuff. Right off the campaign trail. Then he backed down at the last minute and told me he'd just made up his mind to make up his mind in a little while."
"Washington's not as crazy about all this as they were this morning, I take it?"
Taylor snorted. "That's a fucking understatement. You can hear them all running for the trees from here."
"I'll just bet that little puss Bouquette has his snout in it," Williams said. "Typical goddamned civilian hotshot. I never knew him to get a single tough intel call right. But he's got terrific connections. Never wore a uniform, unless it was at some overseas prep school. But he figures he knows your job and mine by virtue of family lineage and intuition."
Taylor did not respond. He knew of Bouquette. More than he wanted to know. Courtesy of Daisy.
He wondered if Daisy was still there, in the same room as Waters. But better not to think of all that now.
"Hard day, George?" Williams asked. His tone of voice made it very clear that he understood as only another warrior might understand.
Taylor looked at him. "I lost Dave Heifetz," he said matter-of-factly. "In the Scrambler business. And Manny Martinez. They hit us at Omsk on the way out." Williams looked pensive. "Didn't know Martinez. But Heifetz was a hell of a soldier."
"Yes. He was that." Taylor turned his head in disgust. "And here I am talking about him as though he's dead. While the poor bastard's bundled up in a wing-in-ground, pissing all over himself and wondering what on earth happened . . . and what's going to happen." Taylor took a step to the side, as if trying to move away from himself. "God almighty. I just don't know what to do for him. And for all the rest of them. What do you do, Tucker? What on earth do you do? You know what it's like to write the letters to the wives or parents when some poor trooper buys the farm. But what the fuck do you write when Johnny's coming home as a physical vegetable with unimpaired emotions and a perfect grasp of the world around him. With memories of what women are like, with—
"George. You're tired."
"No. Really. What in-the-name-of-Christ do you do? Send the folks back home a catalog for oversize cribs and disposable diapers? Oh, by the way, Mrs. Jones, your husband may prove a disappointment to you on several counts, owing to his recent unfortunate term of military service. Jesus, Tucker . . . it's a hell of a thing to find yourself wishing that your own men had died."
"Maybe we'll find a cure."
"Yeah."
"Heifetz was a damned good man.
"And a hell of a lot life gave him for it. And Manny. Martinez. Tucker, I can't tell you what a good man he was. I'm lost without him."
Williams smiled. "George, you've never been lost in your life. Why, hell. You even found your way out of Africa without so much as a credit card or a supply of condoms."
Taylor could not smile. He retreated into silence.
"You remember," Williams went on, "lying in that damned tent in the Azores? Playing poker with the grim reaper. And I lectured you for all the saints and sinners to hear about how I was going to clean up Military Intelligence. You know what I was always thinking, George? I was shooting off my mouth and thinking, Jesus Christ. I wish I had whatever the hell it is this guy Taylor's got. You used to lie on your bunk and look right through me. You didn't need me to explain the world to you. You already knew the things I was struggling to figure out." Williams smiled into his reminiscences. "Anyway, we came a hell of a lot further than either of us had much right to expect."
"Not far enough," Taylor said.
"Not yet. But maybe we're underestimating the President after all. He just may give us the green light."
"I don't know. Everybody's telling him to head for the bushes."
"Well, hope for the best."
Taylor sighed. "I gave it my best shot. Tucker. I really did. But I'm just so goddamned tired. I couldn't get the words to come out right. All I could think was how I wanted to reach out and grab him and shake the shit out of him. To bring home to him what it means if we quit now. Damn it, though," Taylor said. "All my life I've had a healthy respect for language. I read the good books. I paid attention. I always tried to write op orders in clean, clear language. I valued words, crazy as that sounds. But, when I really needed the right words, they wouldn't come."
"You can't do it all by yourself, George. What the hell, if the chickenshit bastards tell us to come home, it'll be on their heads. You and me can retire and go fishing."
"No," Taylor said emphatically. "It'll be on our heads. The Army will have failed. That's what the black words on the white pages are going to say."
"Fuck 'em, then."
Taylor glanced down at the dirty bandage on his hand and shook the burned paw lightly, without really thinking about it.
"You should've seen Lucky Dave," he said. "Tucker, I honestly did not think I could bear it. Maybe I don't have what it takes to be a soldier after all."
"When's the President supposed to get back to you?" Taylor glanced at his watch. "Seven minutes."
Down the length of the central environmental shelter, the intern
al entrance flap pushed to the side and a man in a Soviet uniform entered the headquarters complex. As the man straightened up in the dusky light, Taylor recognized Kozlov. He was glad to see him, anxious for any help he could get. Would the Soviets come through?
As Taylor watched, Merry Meredith came out of the S-2's compartment and headed over to greet the Russian.
Merry was the only one of them left now. Of the men Taylor trusted. And loved.
Taylor looked at Tucker Williams. It was odd how relationships developed in the Army. Taylor was never completely sure whether Williams should be classed as an acquaintance or a friend. There were varying degrees of intimacy in the military. Taylor always worked well with
Williams, respected him, and willingly drank a few beers with him whenever their paths crossed at some overly laminated officer's club. Yet, a nebulous spiritual gulf remained between them. Williams was right. In the Azores Taylor had, indeed, looked right through him, his thoughts in a different world.
There had been only Meredith, Martinez, and Heifetz, a brotherhood assembled by the odd chance of a bad year, by the simple accident of change-of-station orders and discovered affinities. And now only Meredith was left.
"I'd better get back to the comms bubble," Taylor said. "Keep your fingers crossed, Tucker."
"Will do."
Taylor began to turn away, just as a lightning bolt of recognition struck right through him. He had to call up his last reserves of determination in order to keep going, telling himself that it was all just the oversensitivity that came with weariness, a matter of emotional as well as physical exhaustion. The coincidence was absolute nonsense.
He had realized of whom Williams's young warrant officer reminded him. It was uncanny, as if the Hindus were dead right about the constant cycles, the endless and inevitable returnings.
Ryder reminded him of the young warrant officer who had been his copilot and weapons officer in Zaire, the broken boy who had pleaded for water until Taylor shot him in the head.
Daisy listened. She thought she would go mad. Wanting to speak, to cry out to them all that it was time to put an end to the folly, she could not find the opportunity or the courage. Her opinion was not asked as the men in the room labored through all of the arguments against further military action one more time. Unanimously, the President's advisers shared her view that it would be insane and pointless to accede to Taylor's wishes.
The Soviets, on the other hand, were no help at all. Speaking to Waters, the Soviet president had seemed preoccupied, inexplicably removed from the matters at hand. Readily agreeing to anything Waters suggested, the
Soviet seemed, above all else, to want to bring the conversation to a speedy end. Moscow seemed fractured. State security had been cooperating wholeheartedly with U.S. Army Intelligence on the scheme to strike the Japanese command computer system, while the Soviet Ministry of Defense seemed ready to run up the white flag. Something disturbing was going on in the Kremlin, and it gnawed at Daisy that she could not figure it out.
In any case, the raid was a hopeless idea. It was an act of desperation, conceived by a man who could not face reality. They all agreed. Yet, not one of them stated it with sufficient clarity and emphasis for her. She wanted to be absolutely certain that the President understood the absurdity of Taylor's vision. She had begun to trust Waters's judgment. But, given all of the evidence that had been presented, she could not believe the man had allowed the deliberations to drag on this long. It was indisputably clear that Waters needed to disengage American forces as rapidly as possible and bring the troops home.
To bring Taylor home. Alive.
On the sole occasion when she legitimately might have spoken up, she had held her tongue. The President had grilled Bouquette for the third time about the massed crowds in Baku, and Bouquette had repeated his conviction that Taylor was simply an old soldier who did not understand international realities. Of course the demonstrations were pro-Japanese and anti-American. Nothing else made sense.
Daisy had known better. Bouquette was a bureaucrat, while she had worked her way up this far with no adornment other than her talent as an analyst. And upon seeing the first scan images of the crowds in downtown Baku, then the pictures of the mob ringing the Japanese headquarters compound, she had recognized instantly that the Japanese were in trouble. Taylor, in a few simple words, had summarized her views. Those crowds bore with them the unmistakable odor of hostility.
But she did not care about the truth anymore. She did not care about the fate of nations. She realized that all of it was nothing but nonsense, games for grown-up boys without the courage to accept what really mattered in life.
Had the President asked directly for her opinion, she would have stood up and lied.
All she wanted was the return of that scarred, weary, frightened man whose features had appeared so briefly on the communications monitor.
"And what about the charge of unfitness?" President Waters asked. "What do we know about this Lieutenant Colonel Reno? Why should I put any credence whatsoever in his accusations?"
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff raised his hand from the table as if freeing a small bird. "I don't know Lieutenant Colonel Reno personally, Mr. President. But I knew his father. Good family. Army since Christ was a corporal. If you'll excuse the expression, sir."
"Mr. President," Bouquette jumped in, "I can second that. I worked for General Reno when he chaired the old interagency group. Any son of his would stand for the old tried-and-true values."
"I take it," Waters said quietly, "that Colonel Taylor does not spring from a good, old family?"
Bouquette and the chairman glanced at each other, sensing that they had maneuvered themselves into a dangerous position. After a brief mental holding action, the chairman replied matter-of-factly:
"Mr. President, I know nothing of Colonel Taylor's antecedents."
"But the man has a good military record?"
"Yes, sir. Colonel Taylor has a remarkable military record. But . . . even the scrappiest street-fighter may not turn out to be Olympic boxing material. Personally, I've always been fond of George Taylor. But we have to bear in mind that we just may have taken a superb tactical soldier and elevated him beyond his competence. Certainly, if I had to go back to, say, Mexico, I'd want George Taylor in my foxhole. Fine, fine soldier. But we may have asked too much of him by putting him in so independent and sensitive a position."
Waters nodded. "All right. Next issue. From a purely military standpoint, what chance would Colonel Taylor's operation have of success?"
This time the chairman did not require a pause to analyze the situation. "Only the slightest. One in ten? One in a hundred? It's not really possible to quantify it, as Colonel Taylor himself pointed out. But, you see, Mr. President, an operation of that kind requires careful and extensive planning ... weeks, if not months, of rehearsals. You've got to war-game every possible contingency. Ideally, you'd want to build a mock-up of the Japanese headquarters complex, for instance. And you heard what Colonel Taylor admitted—he'd have to rely on the Soviets for refueling. Now, the Soviets are trying to look cooperative, but I personally don't believe they're about to support any more grand offensive operations, in the wake of what happened at Orsk. Turning over that computer brain, for instance—I suspect they were just anxious to get rid of the damned thing. They're passing the hot potato and they just want their fingers to stop burning." The chairman looked down at the fine wood of the tabletop. "George Taylor's a good soldier, and he doesn't want to admit he's licked. I admire him for that. But we have to take the broader perspective, sir. If nothing else, you can't just run an operation like this off the cuff. I'm willing to go on record to say I am one hundred percent opposed to this endeavor."
"You don't think," Waters asked gently, "that desperate times may call for desperate actions?"
The chairman put down his hand, retrapping the invisible bird.
"Desperate? Perhaps, Mr. President. But not foolhardy."
Waters nodded. "I'm anxious to hear your view, Miles," he said to the national security adviser, who had been working studiously on his fingernails.
Ambushed, the man looked up in surprise. "Well, Mr. President ... I think it's all perfectly clear. The Russians want to call it a day. They're heading for the lifeboats. We'd be fools to let ourselves get caught in the middle." Waters began tapping his pencil on his china cup again. The air in the room was very bad, despite the efforts of the ventilation system.
"Thank you," Waters said, "for your assessment. Now, Cliff," he turned to Bouquette. "Back to the intelligence front. Are you in a position yet to guarantee that there will be no new surprises?"
Bouquette looked embarrassed. He rose to his feet with considerably less alacrity than was his habit, touching the line of his tie.
"Unfortunately, Mr. President, I can't offer you such a guarantee. As you know, intelligence work is very complex. And, admittedly, we failed at least part of our test. I am, in fact, already working through a draft plan to streamline and improve the Agency's performance. I'd like to make it my personal mission to ensure that such a failure, however understandable, does not happen again."
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