But she blew it. She waited too long. The nun opened the foil and started to eat the sandwich.
“Damn,” I said.
“Sorry,” Summer said.
I looked at her. “What did you say?”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“No, before that. The last thing you said.”
“I said I can’t just ask her.”
I shook my head. “No, before the breakfasts came.”
“I said it’s a very weak case.”
“Before that.”
I saw her rewind the tape in her head. “I said Vassell and Coomer would have gotten away with it if you hadn’t ignored Willard.”
I nodded. Thought about that fact for a minute. Then I closed my eyes.
I opened them again in Los Angeles. The plane touched down and the thump and screech of tires on tarmac woke me up. Then the reverse thrust screamed and the brakes jerked me forward against my belt. It was first light outside. The dawn looked brown, like it often did there. A voice on the PA told us it was seven o’clock in the morning in California. We had been heading west for two solid days and each twenty-four-hour period was averaging more like twenty-eight. I had slept for a while and I didn’t feel tired. But I still felt hungry.
We shuffled off the plane and walked down to the baggage claim. That was where drivers met people. I scanned around. Saw that Calvin Franz hadn’t sent anyone. He had come himself instead. I was happy about that. He was a welcome sight. I felt like we were going to be in good hands.
“I’ve got news for you,” he said.
I introduced him to Summer. He shook her hand and took her bag and carried it. I guessed it was partly a courtly gesture and partly his way of hustling us out to his Humvee a little bit faster. It was parked there in the no-waiting zone. But the cops were staying well away from it. Camouflaged black-and-green Humvees tend to have that effect. We all piled in. I let Summer ride in front. Partly a courtly gesture of my own, and partly because I wanted to sprawl in the back. I was cramped from the plane.
“They found the Grand Marquis,” Franz said.
He gunned the big turbodiesel and moved off the curb. Irwin was just north of Barstow, which was about thirty miles away across the breadth of the city. I figured it would take him about an hour to get us there through the morning traffic. I saw Summer watching how he drove. Professional appraisal in her eyes. It would probably have taken her about thirty-five minutes.
“It was at Andrews,” Franz said. “Dumped there on the fifth.”
“When Marshall was recalled to Germany,” I said.
Franz nodded at the wheel. “That’s what their gate log says. Parked by Marshall with a Transportation Corps reference on the docket. Our guys trailered it to the FBI. Faster that way. They had to call in a few favors. The Bureau worked on it all night. Reluctantly at first, but then they got interested in a big hurry. It seems to be tied in with a case they’re working.”
“Brubaker,” I said.
He nodded again. “The trunk mat had parts of Brubaker on it. Blood and brain matter, to be specific. It had been scrubbed with a paper towel, but not well enough.”
“Anything else?” I said.
“Lots of things. There was blood from a different source, just trace evidence of a transfer smear, maybe from a jacket sleeve or a knife blade.”
“Carbone’s,” I said. “From when Marshall was riding in the trunk afterward. Did they find a knife?”
“No,” Franz said. “But Marshall’s prints are all over the inside of the trunk.”
“They would be,” I said. “He spent several hours in there.”
“There was a single dog tag under the mat,” Franz said. “Like the chain had been broken and one of them had slipped off and gotten away.”
“Carbone’s?” I said.
“None other.”
“Amateur hour,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Mostly normal stuff. It was an untidy car. Lots of hair and fiber, fast-food wrappers, soda cans, stuff like that.”
“Any yogurt pots?”
“One,” Franz said. “In the trunk.”
“Strawberry or raspberry?”
“Strawberry. Marshall’s prints on the foil tab. Seems like he had a snack.”
“He opened it,” I said. “But he didn’t eat it.”
“There was an empty envelope,” Franz said. “Addressed to Kramer at XII Corps in Germany. Airmail, postmarked a year ago. No return address. Like a photo mailer, but it didn’t have anything in it.”
I said nothing. He was looking at me in the mirror.
“Is any of this good news?” he said.
I smiled. “It just moved us up from speculative to circumstantial.”
“A giant leap for mankind,” he said.
Then I stopped smiling and looked away. I started thinking about Carbone, and Brubaker, and Mrs. Kramer. And Mrs. Reacher. All over the world people were dying, in the early part of January 1990.
In the end it took us more than an hour to get to Irwin. I guessed it was true what people said about LA highways. The post looked the same as it usually did. As busy as always. It occupied a huge acreage of the Mojave Desert. One or the other of the armored cavalry regiments lived there on a rotating basis and acted as the home team when other units came in to exercise. There was a real spring-training atmosphere. The weather was always good, people always had fun in the sunshine playing with the big expensive toys.
“You want to take care of business right away?” Franz asked.
“Are you keeping an eye on them?”
He nodded. “Discreetly.”
“So let’s have breakfast first.”
A U.S. Army O Club was the perfect destination for people half-starved on airline food. The buffet was a mile long. Same menu as in Germany, but the orange juice and the fruit platters looked more authentic in California. I ate as much as an average rifle company and Summer ate more. Franz had already eaten. I fueled up on as much coffee as I could take. Then I pushed back from the table. Took a deep breath.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s go do it.”
We went back to Franz’s office and he made a call to his guys. They told him Marshall was already out on the range, but Vassell and Coomer were sitting tight in a VOQ rec room. Franz drove us there in his Humvee. We got out on the sidewalk. The sun was bright. The air was warm and dusty. I could smell all the prickly little desert plants that were growing as far as the eye could see.
Irwin’s VOQ looked like it had been built by the same motel contractor that had gotten the XII Corps contract in Germany. There were rows of identical rooms around a sandy courtyard. On one side was a shared facility. TV rooms, table tennis, lounges. Franz led us in through a door and stepped to one side and we found Vassell and Coomer sitting knee to knee in a pair of leather armchairs. I realized I had seen them only once before, when they came to my office at Bird. That seemed disproportionate, considering how much time I had spent thinking about them.
They were both wearing crisp new BDUs in the revised desert camouflage, the pattern people were calling chocolate chip. They both looked just as fake as they had in their woodland greens. They still looked like Rotary Club members. Vassell was still bald and Coomer was still wearing eyeglasses.
They both looked up at me.
I took a breath.
Senior officers.
Harassment.
It could be you that goes to jail.
“General Vassell,” I said. “And Colonel Coomer. You are under arrest on a charge of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice in that you conspired together and with other persons to commit homicide.”
I held my breath.
But neither one of them had a reaction. Neither one of them spoke. They just gave it up. They just looked resigned. Like the other shoe had finally dropped and the inevitable had finally happened. Like they had been expecting this moment from the start. Like they had known for sure it was coming all along. I breathed out. The
re were supposed to be all kinds of stages in a person’s reaction to bad news. Grief, anger, denial. But these guys were already through all of that. That was clear. They were right there at the end of the process, butted hard up against acceptance.
I cued Summer to complete the formalities. There were all kinds of things from the Uniform Code that you had to spell out. All kinds of advisements and warnings. Summer ran through them better than I would have. Her voice was clear and her manner was professional. Neither Vassell nor Coomer responded at all. No bluster, no pleading, no angry protestations of innocence. They just nodded obediently in all the right places. Got up out of their chairs at the end without even being told.
“Handcuffs?” Summer asked me.
I nodded.
“For sure,” I said. “And walk them to the brig. All the way. Don’t put them in the truck. Let everybody see them. They’re a disgrace.”
I got directions from a cavalry guy and took Franz’s Humvee to go get Marshall. He was supposed to be camped out in a hut near a disused range target, observing. The disused target was described to me as an obsolete Sheridan tank. It was supposed to be fairly beat-up. The hut was supposed to be in better shape and close to the old tank. I was told to stick to the established tracks to avoid unexploded ordnance and desert tortoises. If I ran over the ordnance, I would be killed. If I ran over the tortoises, I would be reprimanded by the Department of the Interior.
I left the main post alone, at nine-thirty in the morning exactly. I didn’t want to wait for Summer. She was all tied up with processing Vassell and Coomer. I felt like we were at the end of a long journey, and I just wanted to get it over. I took a borrowed sidearm, but it was still a bad decision.
twenty-three
Irwin owned enough of the Mojave that it could be a plausible stand-in for the vast deserts of the Middle East or, if you ignored the heat and the sand, a plausible stand-in for the endless steppes of Eastern Europe. Which meant I was long out of sight of the main post buildings before I was even a tenth of the way to the promised Sheridan tank. The terrain was completely empty all around me. The Humvee felt tiny out there. It was January so there was no heat shimmer but the temperature was still pretty high. I applied what the unofficial Humvee manual called 2-40 air-conditioning, which meant you opened two windows and drove at forty miles an hour. That set up a decent breeze. Normally forty miles an hour in a Humvee feels pretty fast because of its bulk. But out there in the vastness it felt like no speed at all.
A whole hour later I was still doing forty and I still hadn’t found the hut. The range went on forever. Irwin was one of the world’s great military reservations. That was for sure. Maybe the Soviets had a bigger place somewhere, but I would have been surprised. Maybe Willard could have told me. I smiled to myself and kept on going. Drove over a ridge and saw an empty plain below me. A dot on the next horizon that might have been the hut. A dust cloud maybe five miles to the west that might have been tanks on the move.
I kept to the track. Kept going at forty. Dust was trailing behind me like a tail. The air coming in the windows was hot. The plain was maybe three miles across. The dot on the horizon became a speck and then grew larger the closer I got to it. After a mile I could make out two separate shapes. The old tank on the left, and the observation hut on the right. After another mile I could make out three separate shapes. The old tank on the left, the observation hut on the right, and Marshall’s own Humvee in the middle. It was parked to the west of the building, in the morning shade. It looked like the same shoot-and-scoot adaptation I had seen at XII Corps in Germany. The building was a simple raw cinder-block square. Big holes for windows. No glass. The tank was an old M551, which was a lightweight armored-aluminum piece that had started its design life as a reconnaissance vehicle. It was about a quarter of the weight of an Abrams and it was exactly the type of thing that people like Lieutenant Colonel Simon were betting the future on. It had seen service with some of our Airborne divisions. It wasn’t a bad machine. But this example looked pretty much decomposed. It had old plywood skirts on it designed to make it resemble some kind of previous-generation Soviet armor. There had been no point in training our guys to shoot at something our other guys were still using.
I stayed on the track and coasted to a stop about thirty yards south of the hut. Opened the door and slid out into the heat. I guessed it was less than seventy degrees but after North Carolina and Frankfurt and Paris it felt like Saudi Arabia.
I saw Marshall watching me from a hole in the cinder block.
I had only seen him once and never face-to-face. He had been in the Grand Marquis on New Year’s Day, outside Bird’s post headquarters, in the dark, behind green-tinted glass. I had pegged him then as a tall dark guy and his file had confirmed it. He looked just the same now. Tall, heavy, olive skin. Thick black hair cut short. He was in desert camouflage and he was stooping a little to see out the cinder-block hole.
I stood next to my Humvee. He watched me, silently.
“Marshall?” I called.
He didn’t respond.
“You alone in there?”
No reply.
“Military police,” I called, louder. “All personnel, exit that structure immediately.”
Nobody responded. Nobody came out. I could still see Marshall through the hole. He could still see me. I guessed he was alone. If he had had a partner in there, the partner would have come out. Nobody else had a reason to be afraid of me.
“Marshall?” I called again.
He ducked out of sight. Just melted backward into the shadows inside. I took the borrowed gun out of my pocket. It was a new-issue Beretta M9. I heard an old training mantra in my head: Never trust a weapon that you haven’t personally test-fired. I chambered a round. The sound was loud in the desert stillness. I saw the dust cloud in the west. It was maybe a little larger and a little closer than before. I clicked the Beretta’s safety to Fire.
“Marshall?” I called.
He didn’t reply. But I heard a low voice very faintly and then a brief scratchy burst of radio static. There was no antenna on the roof of the hut. He must have had a portable field radio in there with him.
“Who are you going to call, Marshall?” I said to myself. “The cavalry?”
Then I thought: The cavalry. An armored cavalry regiment. I turned and looked west at the dust cloud. Suddenly realized how things stood. I was all alone in the middle of nowhere with a proven killer. He was in a hut, I was out in the open. My partner was a ninety-pound woman about fifty miles away. His buddies were riding around in seventy-ton tanks just below the visible horizon.
I got off the track fast. Worked around to the east of the hut. I saw Marshall again. He moved from one hole to another and watched me. Just gazed out at me.
“Step out of the hut, Major,” I called.
There was silence for a long moment. Then he called back to me.
“I’m not going to do that,” he said.
“Step out, Major,” I called. “You know why I’m here.”
He ducked back into the darkness.
“As of right now you’re resisting arrest,” I called.
No reply. No sound at all. I moved on. Circled the hut. Worked around to the north. There were no holes in the north wall. Just an iron door. It was closed. I figured it wouldn’t have a lock. What was there to steal? I could walk right up to it and pull it open. Was he armed? I guessed standard procedure would make him unarmed. What kind of deadly enemy could a gunnery observer expect to face? But I guessed a smart guy in Marshall’s situation would be taking all kinds of precautions.
There was beaten earth outside the iron door where people had made informal tracks to places they had parked. What an architect would call pathways of desire. None of them led north toward me. They all led roughly west or east. Shade in the morning, shade in the afternoon. So I stayed on open ground and got within ten yards of the door. Then I stopped. A good position, on the face of it. Maybe better than going all the way in a
nd risking a surprise. I could wait there all day. No problem. It was January. The noon sun wasn’t going to hurt me. I could wait until Marshall gave up. Or starved to death. I had eaten more recently than he had. That was for sure. And if he decided to come out shooting, I could shoot him first. No problem with that either.
The problem was with the holes in the cinder block. In the other three walls. They had looked the size of regular windows. Big enough for a man to climb through. Even a big man like Marshall. He could climb through the west wall and get to his Humvee. Or he could climb through the south wall and get to mine. Military vehicles don’t have ignition keys. They have big red starter buttons precisely so that guys can throw themselves inside in a panic and get themselves the hell out of Dodge. And I couldn’t watch the west wall and the south wall simultaneously. Not from any kind of a position that offered concealment.
Did I need concealment?
Was he armed?
I had an idea about how to find out.
Never trust a weapon that you haven’t personally test-fired.
I aimed at the center of the iron door and pulled the trigger. The Beretta worked. It worked just fine. It flashed and boomed and kicked and there was an enormous clang and the round left a small bright pit in the metal ten yards away.
I let the echoes die.
“Marshall?” I called. “You’re resisting arrest. So I’m going to come around and I’m going to start firing through the window apertures. Either the rounds will kill you or the ricochets will wound you. You want me to stop at any time, you just come on out with your hands on your head.”
I heard a burst of radio static again. Inside the hut.
I moved to the west. Kept low and fast. If he was armed he was going to shoot, but he was going to miss. Give me a choice of who to get shot at by and I’ll pick a pointy-headed strategic planner any day of the week. On the other hand, he hadn’t been completely inept with Carbone or Brubaker. So I widened my radius a little to give myself a chance of getting behind his Humvee. Or behind the old Sheridan tank.
Halfway there I paused and fired. It was no kind of a good system to make a promise and then not keep it. But I aimed high on the inside face of the window reveal so that if the round hit him it would have had to come off two walls and the ceiling first. Most of the energy would be expended and it wouldn’t hurt him much. The nine-millimeter Parabellum was a decent round, but it didn’t have magical properties.
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