KIA

by Thomas Holland

  Perkins smiled broadly and bobbed his head at McKelvey’s waist. “Doc Kel with a sidearm. Shit if that isn’t the closest thing to a weapon of mass destruction that I can think of.”

  “That’s why they don’t give me bullets. But, hey, if y’all aren’t still lookin’ for WMDs, then what’s the Iraq Support Group up to nowadays, anyhow? In case you haven’t heard, Saddam’s history.”

  “Other duties as assigned.” Perkins shrugged as he stacked his Jell-O bowls. “Nothing I can talk about—if you get my meaning.” He said that a great deal, whether you got his meaning or not.

  “Hmmm,” McKelvey acknowledged. He said that a great deal, especially when he didn’t get the meaning. “Hmmm,” he repeated as he forked some peas and carrots into his mouth.

  “How about you?” Perkins asked as he began organizing the remaining food on his tray. “You involved in that war crimes shit?”

  “I believe I’m innocent until proven guilty.”

  “Too bad. I was going to ask for your autograph. No, what I meant was that shit up north. Isn’t someone digging up some of those mass graves north of here? I’d heard it was some guys from the Park Service or the Forest Service.”

  “Try Ringling Brothers. Nope, not us. Our folks are giving a wide berth to that tar baby.” McKelvey took another bite of peas and carrots.

  Perkins readjusted the empty Styrofoam bowls on his tray and squinted at McKelvey. “So what then? Secret squirrel type shit?”

  “Not really. Three guys in a Humvee. No radio contact. No visual. Just disappeared.”

  “Shit to be them—if you know what I mean. Any luck?”

  “Let’s just say we found the Humvee. More than that, I can’t talk about.”

  “Roger that,” Perkins said. “Understood. But tell me, Doc, why the hell you here? You did your time here six months ago. I don’t know the details about this case you’re working, but if it’s not that sensitive, couldn’t you have sent someone else? Things can’t possibly be so bad at work that you’d volunteer for another trip to this shit show.”

  McKelvey took a bite of steak and chewed. “You have no idea.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Fort Knox, Kentucky

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2007

  Sisal Johnson’s brief, rampant moment of fame had come sixty-two years earlier. For an eye blink of a day and a half, young Tech Sergeant Sisal Johnson had been the fill-in driver for General George Patton, Jr., during the hell-bent gallop across Western Europe. At the time it had been a case of being in the right place at a most opportune time, but over a thousand renditions, over sixty Memorial Days and Veterans’ Days of telling and retelling, that day and a half had grown in meaning and duration to a point where Sisal now remembered himself as a friend and close confidant of the general; as a man whose vision and judgment Patton valued and solicited. He had been a cog in the most magnificent machinery in history.

  He could be found almost any day somewhere in the mnemonic cocoon of the George Patton Museum near Keyes Park at Fort Knox—always ready with a story or an explanation for any available or sympathetic ear. As a retired sergeant major he had ready access to the post, and his continued and regular presence had finally resulted in the staff at the museum acknowledging him as a fixture not unlike the tanks and armored cars planted out on the lawn. An unofficial docent.

  He didn’t get to see his family much anymore. His wife was gone six years this coming August, and his two daughters were married with busy lives of their own to manage. One lived in Cincinnati, and he saw her occasionally but not with any particular regularity; the other lived in Dayton, which might as well have been somewhere in the upper Ukraine. As hard as that was, it was his two grandsons that he missed the most—they so loved his stories, and he so loved telling them.

  Which was why when they came to visit, as they had now, he made the most of it.

  The sun was out, stretching broadly across a clear sky, but the day had the sharp-edged snap of a hurried autumn. The air was clean. Sisal Johnson had his two young grandsons at the Patton Museum. It was time to show them the tanks, and the cars, and the jeeps that he and the general used to drive around in; the ones that they’d planned the invasion of Europe from; the ones that they’d used to bust through the brittle Siegfried Line. He’d come to rap on the armor and slap the tracks, to once again have an existence and an identity and a magnetic center on which to home his life.

  They had arrived too early, and Sisal was anxious. It was only eight-thirty and a Saturday, so the museum wouldn’t be open for another hour and a half. So much the better. More time. More memories. In the meantime there were the static displays outside, including one of his favorites, the Soviet T34 medium tank, a monster of thick steel plating and even thicker Slavic functionalism. You could feel the thunder and clank of the treads just looking at it.

  As they stood in front of the tank, Sisal Johnson animatedly explained to his two grandsons how the turret revolved and how the gun fired, and how the concussion would ring your ears for hours and make beads of sweat form on your brow. He explained how the tank turned by stopping one track and allowing the other to continue, and how he’d once seen a good friend crushed beneath the churning cleats of one of their own monsters. He rapped on the cold metal and pointed and gestured and relived. As he was explaining how the ammunition was taken aboard through a loading hatch he led the two boys to the rear of the tank. The gravel underfoot scrunched and talked under their feet, and it was only then that he noticed a smell—an odor like rusty nails and old copper pennies and damp packets of Sweet ’N Low—and something else. It was a familiar smell. Familiar and strange at the same time.

  He couldn’t quite recognize it.

  Until they reached the rear of the tank.

  And then their lives were changed forever.

  CHAPTER 3

  U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2007

  McKelvey saw the lips moving but all he heard was a buzz. Like a fat, brown summer cicada. In fact, it was so loud he couldn’t concentrate; he could only watch the lips move.

  “I’m not sure I like your attitude, Kel,” Colonel Peter Boschet buzzed. The CILHI commander’s face was screwed into the same knot that always formed when he was forcing his brain to work. It looked like a colorful ball of rubber bands and was discomforting to witness. He was short and pear-shaped and possessed of a solid vein of the pure stupids that they still talked about at the Academy in awed whispers. Colonel Boschet—known behind his back as Colonel Botch-It for his ability to screw up even the simplest task—was, in fact, only marginally smarter than a coffee can full of pea gravel. “Your little time off running around in the desert playing Indiana Jones doesn’t seem to have helped your attitude.”

  “Call me Dr. McKelvey,” Robert McKelvey roused his interest long enough to say. It had just popped into his head as he listened to the buzz. In truth, McKelvey was called Kel by most people, had been since shortly after he was born. In what was perhaps the first mystery of his life, his parents had given him the name Robert, but then never used it. His father had the ownership rights to both Robert and Bob sewn up, at least up until he died of lung cancer at too early an age, and Kel’s mother wouldn’t tolerate the use of “Little Bob” or “Junior” in her presence. As a result, in the world of dwindling options, their youngest son became Kel. It was an awkward name—people usually assumed that his name was Cal—but it had avoided confusion growing up at the supper table, and for better or worse he was stuck with it now. In fact, even though his father was now gone, Robert and Bob were seldom used except in formal situations and by strangers and those trying to piss him off. Occasionally, his wife would begin sentences with “Oh, Robert,” but in those cases the inflection was the same as that with which she might say “Oh, Lord,” after hearing that her twin sons were in the principal’s office again—sort of a resigned expression of utter and complete exhaustion.

  Kel had been asked t
o come down to the Botch-It’s office to discuss some special assignment. Whatever the assignment was, as absolutely mindless as Kel knew it would be, he also knew that the worst part was having to sit quietly while two minutes of information was strung out over sixty minutes like a long tug of administrative taffy. There was a time when he’d had the patience for it, when one of his strong points was suffering fools lightly, but those times had long ago faded in the rearview mirror. He’d eaten too many sand-flavored MREs; spent too many nights away from his wife and children; reinvented the wheel with too many come-and-go commanders. This one had put him over the edge. Botch-It had a hard-earned reputation for staffing everything to death and then being totally incapable of making a decision or acting on common sense, and on the rare occasion when he accidentally did make a decision, the odds were well worth betting it would be a bad one. It was leadership at the peak of incompetence. In fact, Kel had resigned three times in the last year only to be talked down off the ledge by the deputy commander, Leslie Neep. He’d even sent himself to Iraq twice in order to keep his hands as far away from Botch-It’s throat as possible and still justify earning a paycheck. Fortunately for all, Botch-It was on the downward slope of a three-year assignment with sixteen months to go, and every member of the staff could rattle off the time remaining—down to the day—481 as of yesterday.

  Boschet tightened the knot he’d made of his face and cut a quick look at Les Neep sitting in the chair next to Kel. He tended to use Neep as a translator when he couldn’t understand his scientific director—which recently had become always. He looked back at Kel. “Say again.”

  “Call me Doctor McKelvey.”

  There was a pause while the response percolated through to his brain. “See? See? That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about,” Boschet erupted. His voice was too loud for his office and there was a scurrying sound from the outer room as people either found other things to do, or, as Kel suspected, positioned themselves to eavesdrop better. “I hear you tell everyone in this entire building—even the goddamn janitors—everyone in this building to call you Kel, but you tell me to call you Doctor. Me. The commander. I don’t get it. Check that. I do get it and what I get, I don’t like. Are you trying to piss me off?”

  “Why, is it workin’?”

  “You pompous prima donna. I don’t have to—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Time out.” Les Neep sat forward in his chair and inserted himself into the rapidly closing space between Kel and Boschet. “Sir, I don’t think Kel, ahhh, Dr. McKelvey meant that as it came out. Right, Dr. McKelvey?” He continued before Kel had a chance to respond. “My read on it is that the Doc—see, I call him Doctor too—he just wants to keep things professional between the two of you. You’re the commander and he’s the lab director. You all need to maintain a sense of, a kind of…help me out here, Kel. A kind of…”

  “Professional detachment.”

  “Bingo.” Les snapped his fingers. “Detachment. It’s a professional thing. That’s all that it is. Right, Kel—Doc? A professional kinda thing.”

  “Les, do you take me for a moron?” Boschet’s face remained screwed into a knot of rubber bands. “Do you? And how about you, Doctor McKelvey? Do I look like a moron to you?”

  Les tried to stop Kel but reacted too slowly. He barely had time to mutter, “Oh, crap.”

  Kel leaned forward to better peer around Neep’s intervening shoulder. “No, sir, Colonel. I think by definition, morons have to have an IQ over forty-nine. I suspect you’re more in the imbecile range.”

  Boschet exploded. “Get the fuck out of my office. You goddamn overeducated prick bastard. Les, get this son of a bitch out of my sight before I forget that I’m a professional in the United States Army.”

  Les Neep had already grabbed Kel and was shoving him toward the door.

  CHAPTER 4

  U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2007

  Les Neep closed his office door and shook his head. He could feel each of his sixty-three years in his bones. “Are you out of your damn mind?” He moved around Kel, sat down, leaned forward with his elbows on his desk and his head in his hands, and spoke into a pile of papers in front of him. “Why do you do that? Why?”

  Kel dropped into the chair in front of Les’s desk as if he had bricks in his pants pockets. He let his head fall back on his neck and closed his eyes. He didn’t respond.

  “Dammit to hell, what gets into you? All you had to do was come down here, sit quietly, and nod,” Les said to the papers. “Just nod.”

  “Easier said than done,” Kel finally responded.

  “Like hell. I do it all day long. Sit and nod. Sit and nod. Shit, son, sometimes I even smile. Smile and nod.” He looked up. “But no. Doctor McKelvey, he can’t just nod; no, sir, he’s got to go poke a stick in the colonel’s eye. A big, long stick that he spends his time sharpening on a dull rock.”

  “Yeah, well maybe there’s only enough room for one noddin’ dog in the back of this car.”

  Les Neep leaned back in his chair and stared at Kel for a moment before responding. “Like I deserved that. Like I really deserve a rash of shit from you. Who just defended you in the Old Man’s office? This nodding dog, that’s who.”

  Kel stood up and walked to the window. He crossed his arms and squared his stance. “Don’t need you to defend me, Les. Not from the likes of Botch-It anyhow.”

  Les snorted. “Right. You’re handling it so well. How many times you volunteered for Iraq? Twice? Tell you what, when your parts come back in a damn box next time, I’ll remember to nod at your funeral. How ’bout that? I’ll sit on a wide pew in the back and nod.”

  The two men went quiet.

  Kel broke the silence. “Sound like my wife,” he said softly.

  “And you act like mine,” Les responded. “About as reasonable.”

  Kel turned away from the window and smiled. He shrugged to break the growing tightness. “Hey, got me out of whatever numbskull assignment Botch-It had in mind.”

  Les looked down at the papers on his desk and sucked in a deep lungful of tension. “I wish it were that easy, buddy. It ain’t.”

  “Oh, yeah, it is,” Kel answered. “Can be anyhow. You just keep sittin’ there, and I’ll go back to my office and try to figure out what I was doin’ when Colonel Numb-Nut called me down here.”

  “Afraid not,” Les sighed. He took up the papers on his desk. It wasn’t a loose pile but rather a bound report the thickness of a small phone book, a plastic spiral corkscrewing along one edge. “The Old Man’s got some concerns.”

  “The Old Man’s got shit for brains. On a good day.”

  “Maybe so,” Les conceded. “Maybe so, but he still has some concerns, and he’s looking for someone to share them with.”

  “That right?” Kel’s voice regained an edge.

  Les flipped the report at Kel. He waited for him to look at the title page. “That’s the army’s guidelines for developing a Diversity Awareness Plan in the workforce.”

  “Forget it, Les.” Kel laughed as he tossed the report back in the other man’s lap.

  “Don’t make me order you.”

  “Order me? Try. Last time I checked, I didn’t work for you. I work for the little pear-shaped man with the IQ to match.”

  Les put the report back on his desk and stood up. He drummed his fingers momentarily. “You’re shooting the messenger here, my friend. Maybe you don’t work for me, but dammit, Kel, he’s dead serious about you doing this.”

  “Doin’ what? A Diversity Awareness Plan? I’m so goddamn tired of other people tellin’ me how to do my job.”

  “No one’s telling you how to do your job.”

  “No? How about that memo last week? As I recall, I was instructed to make sure that half of the scientific staff is female.”

  “That’s just a target—”

  “Is that right? A target? And is someone goin’ to tell the North Koreans? Last time I checked, our
friends in the workers’ paradise wouldn’t let us send any women in with the teams. That changed? ’Cause if it hasn’t, then who’ll pull all those fun-filled missions? Do the math, Les. If only half the staff can deploy to North Korea, then the same folks are goin’ to keep gettin’ their tickets punched to that shithole. Not that that causes any morale problems or anythin’.”

  “I’ve been in North Korea. I know—”

  “Like hell you do. You know what two, three days in a North Korean hotel is like. I’m talkin’ about thirty, forty days in a base camp with eighteen-year-old American-hatin’ guards pointin’ guns at you the whole time and calculatin’ how many extra bowls of rice they’ll get for shootin’ your ass. You know, the fastest way to get the staff balanced might be to piss all the men off to the point where half of them resign. That’ll at least take care of sex, though race, creed, and astrological sign may still need some equalizin’.” Kel started for the door. “Diversity Awareness Plan my ass.”

  “Kel, look. As a man of color—”

  “Man of color?” Kel stopped and turned back to face Les. “And what color would that be, Les? Feelin’ blue today? And since when? You’ve been a Texan the whole time I’ve known you. Don’t pull this man-of-color shit on me.”

  Les smiled. “Texan-American, actually. Look—no one’s telling you how to do your job or how to assemble your staff or who to hire—”

  “Like hell you aren’t. You and Botch-It, both. I can only pull so many rabbits out of the hat. Every year it’s ‘do more, do more,’ and every year I get less and less. You know how many qualified applicants we had for the last vacancy?”

  “Kel—”

  “One. One. That doesn’t give me much opportunity to diversify the staff when I have one applicant to choose from, does it?”

  “Kel—”

  “Don’t ‘Kel’ me. How can I recruit anyone—of any friggin’ color—when I’m so fed up dealin’ with Botch-It that even I don’t want to work here myself? As you pointed out, between Iraq and North Korea I almost have my Axis of Evil club card filled up. If I can figure out how to send myself to Iran I’ll win a free pound of anthrax. I’m the closest thing to a postal employee that you’ll ever meet, and I’m supposed to talk people into comin’ to work here?”