by David Poyer
He lost it. Cornered her against the tile, lifted her leg to curl around his back and he was in her, like that, starting to thrust, just gone. Just not really there anymore and at the same time never more there. Out of fucking control he thought vaguely, but actually he wasn’t thinking at all. The shower drilled down into his skull and it was like fucking under a waterfall.
She said into his ear, the breath whuffing out of her as he drove in, “Well now. That little… problem we used to have… all gone away is it?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have enough computing capacity left to generate words and choose among them. He was all the way in and he came back out as slowly as he could. Then he went back in for more.
He felt like he was made out of cast iron still hot inside. There was a narrow place and he went all the way through it. He saw white thighs beneath a slit leather skirt. He saw calves swelling against the tightly laced straps of cork-soled platforms. Soap burned at the corners of his eyes. He came out as slowly as he could and went all the way in. The narrow place was parting. It tightened and then parted again.
A crack snapped through the universe and he went in again. There was nothing beyond it, no thought, no consciousness, no self, no existence. She put her head back against the green and white tile. She reached around him with both hands and pulled him into her. She had fingernails too. The shower roared on his skull like fuel-fed flames. The violet rubber mat with flowers molded into it squeaked and skidded down toward the foot of the tub as their feet thrust against it.
She almost always came before he did but this time it was an awfully close race.
THEY lay on the bed sweating with the air-conditioning on full and blowing over them. Her leg was thrown over him and she lay with her head on his chest. His hand moved over her hair, over and over. It was shorter than he remembered it. She looked bled out in the cruel light. Her eyes were closed tight as if she didn’t want to see. They didn’t say much, just little words that didn’t have much meaning in them.
When he stirred against her again she gave a muffled chuckle. She breathed her warm breath down onto him again and then lowered her head and took him in, all the way.
The crack opened again and this time it was lined with livid lightning. The nothing wasn’t waiting on the other side this time. Instead it was an all-obliterating something he couldn’t look at directly because it was too hot and too bright. He went into it and became it for maybe a thousandth of a second. It was like being eaten by a nuclear fireball. And just for that moment he thought he glimpsed something. But after that thousandth of a second then another and maybe one more the white hotness bloomed out, cooling with expansion, fading to fiery yellow, orange, dull red, fading but still incredibly hot and powerful. The shock wave rolled out over his body. It hit the roof of his brain and his toes and rolled back. It gathered again at the center and pulsed one last time as she shifted her hips and sat up and wiped her lips with the back of her hand.
A frown gathered between her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought I saw them.” He rolled away from her, to the far side of the bed. “That must have been what they saw. Just as it hit.”
“You’re talking about the Horn?”
He took several deep breaths and didn’t answer.
“What’s wrong?” she said again. Then her voice came closer. He felt her fingers on his cheeks and turned his head away. “Are you crying? Damn. Don’t be ashamed, Dan. I’d say it’s long past time.”
LATER, after another shower, they dressed and went down for dinner. He kept an eye peeled for Asian Lolitas, but neither was in evidence. He didn’t see the other Taggers either. Except O’Quinn, who was leaning against the desk, talking to the clerk. The bar was filled with Japanese businessmen. Their wives were in the gift shop bargaining shrilly over Korean vases painted with sunflowers and carved jade translucent as wax and delicate lacquered boxes full of nothing. He sat across from her in the restaurant, feeling like the boxes.
Blair looked more tired than he’d ever seen her. He didn’t think it was the sex. She ate like a wolf, exclaiming over the Korean dishes Dan had gotten his fill of already. He had a steak. They caught up on the rezoning issue on the street in Arlington where they lived, and on the new front porch and renovations to the upstairs bathroom. She always had six projects going, along with the business of the assistant secretary of defense for manpower and personnel. Dan considered himself a hard worker, but he was in awe of how wide her span of control and attention extended.
“How’s things working out at TAG?” she said, moving on from the renovations. “Is that far enough away from DC?”
“I was there a total of forty-eight hours. Met the CO. That’s about it. He cut me orders and I was on my way.” He cut the steak carefully. Took a bite. Not a trace of kimchi flavor. No radishes. He sighed. “Anybody miss me?”
“People call. Reporters. They leave numbers. I don’t call back.” She tried something Dan could have told her was loaded with enough garlic to clear out every vampire south of the DMZ, and closed her eyes in bliss. “Ooh, this is so good. And how about you? Are you happy with it… careerwise?”
“Well, it’s not exactly the usual postcommand tour. The kind you want in your jacket when it’s promotion-board time.”
“It isn’t? It’s bad?”
“It’s not bad. Just out of the… mainstream. For a surface-line type.”
“Refining tactics is out of the mainstream?”
“It’d take too long to explain.”
“Well, where should you be? At this point? I just wish you had a law degree. We’d get you in the secretary’s office. I could get you taken on at Test and Evaluation. No, better yet, Modeling and Simulation. They’re looking for operators, we’re planning a huge effort there—”
“Where I should be as far as the Navy’s concerned is on a headquarters staff. Maybe SURFLANT. Then a major command tour.”
“Didn’t the White House count for that? The staff thing.”
“Some would say so,” he said carefully. “Some wouldn’t. As far as a promotion board goes, I’d say it’d hurt more than it’d help. With the way the president’s cutting the active forces. It would’ve been better if I’d gone right to another command, I mean another ship command, instead of TAG. I’d be in the running for a squadron after that.”
“Surely they can’t blame you for that. Just for being on his staff.”
“They can for being married to one of his appointees,” Dan told her.
A dangerous storm-light glittered. “Well, anytime you don’t want to be—”
“Take it easy! I’m teasing. You’ve always been more concerned about my career than I have, anyway. It’ll take care of itself.”
“A career never ‘takes care of itself.’ Yours especially.” Her lips set. “All you’ve done for the Navy, all your decorations. Are you going to make O-6?”
“I don’t really know. And frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a—”
“I’ll ask some questions. Find out what’s going on.”
He sucked air. “Blair, please do not involve yourself in my career. The single worst thing you can do for me is start screwing around with that. No matter how subtle you think you are. And I never did things ‘for the Navy.’ If I ever did anything beyond the call, it was for the people who worked for me, or because somebody had to do it and I happened to have the watch. Anybody else in my shoes would have done exactly the same.”
She shrugged. Was this his night for making women pout? He tried to change the subject. “Anything new from the investigation? The attempted assassination?”
“Actually that’s getting to be old news. Attention moves on fast… So, how’s the SATYRE going? I don’t hear much from Korea. That’s the Far Eastern desk.”
He’d thought about how to bring it up over the steak, and decided finally just to come right out with it. But first he looked around to make sure no one was listening at the other tables. They didn’t seem to be
. “Well, the word is the administration’s considering more force reductions.”
She didn’t look up. “We’re always looking at those. We BRAC’d the shit out of the stateside establishment. You remember I spent practically all year before last on that.”
“Yeah.”
“Now it’s time to look overseas. We just spend way, far too much on these garrisons. We’ve got to transform. Having tens of thousands of guys sitting on their cans, basically stationary targets—that doesn’t deter anymore. You know there’s a hundred and five separate U.S. bases and installations in South Korea?”
“Huh. That many?”
“If we could get that down to twenty, we’d save serious money. Reduce our friction with the local population too. Whenever one of these kids goes apeshit—well, you just can’t leave young troops in the middle of a population like this.” She told him a horror story about a rape-murder the year before by a soldier from Camp Casey. “Every time that happens, the leftist students organize demonstrations. Sooner or later Seoul’s going to do something about it. Then we won’t have the choice. They’ll hand us our walking papers. Just like the Japanese, in Okinawa. In some ways we’re our own worst enemy.”
“Guess we don’t see much of that side of it in the Navy,” he admitted.
“I guess you don’t.”
“Still, they’ve got to balance that against the threat. At least with that infrastructure, you’ve got surge capacity. You can ramp up, reinforce, mount a major counteroffensive.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
Maybe her answer wasn’t meant to be dismissive but that’s what he heard in her tone. Instead of reacting with his first impulse, he took the last bite of his steak and chewed. Remembering a dark, echoing, musty-smelling hull. The steady hiss of compressed air. The smells of burned powder and hot blood. And the contorted face of a fanatical believer.
“You know… these people are facing real enemies. I’m not sure they always remember that, back in DC.”
She glanced up. “Which means what? The president’s going to throw them to the wolves?”
“I doubt he’d do that. It’s just that—”
“We’re facing challenges all along the arc of crisis. If we try to maintain forces anywhere we can be attacked, guess what? We’ll go as broke as the Soviet Union did. That’s not a winning strategy.” She dabbed at her lipstick with her napkin, and sketched a rapid end-around on the tablecloth with a fingernail. “A mobile force we can deploy where we need it, in days or hours—that’s what we need to iterate toward. The Koreans have to understand that. The era of big forward-based divisions is over.”
It made analytical sense. It made budgetary sense. But it also left him uneasy. He kept thinking of all those guns and tanks along the DMZ. How for forty years Kim II Sung and now his weird son with the Eraserhead haircut had vowed to “reunite” Korea. Hwang’s warning that an ally that came too late was no ally at all. A submarine that had no business where it’d been discovered. And the hatred he’d glimpsed in a human being’s eyes moments before he’d slugged her.
He watched his wife sip wine and tried to let go of it. Not his decision. Not his watch.
But when he reflected on the people he’d worked with and for in the National Security Council, and the way policy got made in DC, his confidence factor in the right decision coming out the delivery end of that sausage grinder wasn’t high. It wasn’t absolutely accurate to say whoever came in with the highest payment bought the decision. But money talked and it talked loud. The special interests kept squeezing the toothpaste tube of the budget their way. And whatever didn’t have a paying patron, no matter how important that issue was in and of itself, got left out.
And really, why should he have been surprised that in a country whose business was business, that everything, absolutely everything, should be for sale?
She put her hand on his. “Deep thoughts?”
He shook himself back to where he was: a nice hotel, with his beautiful wife, whom he really didn’t see that often, on a free night before he went back to sea. “Not really. How about it? Want to go out and paint the town?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
THE next morning was cloudless and still. He stood at the base of a starkly modern tower built of what looked like concrete pipes. They emerged from the grass, bent upward, and met to support a great bronze globe. Around its perimeter the flags of many nations drooped in the breezeless heat. Beside him Blair stood in a white lace dress, adorned with one of the corsages a bowing official had distributed to the ladies in the official party.
Which was slowly breaking up, now that the final benediction had been said. The ceremony had been unmercifully long. One Korean had ranted for nearly forty minutes. Dozens of veterans, war widows, and their families had sat in the audience, many blotting away tears as generals and ambassadors from the coalition nations, in many different languages, had invoked the memories of the fallen. Then each had stepped forward to lay his or her wreath.
He felt out of place uniformwise. The other military were in whites. Gold braid and aiguillettes sparkled. All he’d brought, not expecting formal occasions, was khakis. But the Koreans were also in khakis, or a service dress green he thought was the equivalent. He’d cleaned up his shoes, gotten a close shave, and made sure his ribbons were straight. So far no one had said anything.
But now it was over, and the reception line on the carefully manicured grass was moving. He shook hands with an elderly American in a gray double-breasted suit. Blair said, “Ambassador, I’m Blair Titus.”
“Of course, Blair. I know your boss very well.” He turned his expressionless gaze to Dan and she introduced him. “My husband, who’s currently serving with the ROK Navy.”
“How interesting. Nice to meet you, Mr. Titus.”
The ambassador looked past them and Dan pulled Blair along, though she seemed to want to stay. “You could do his job,” she told him under her breath.
“Me? His job?”
“In your sleep. What’s one of these guys do anyway? Nothing I’ve ever been able to figure out.”
Dan nodded to Carol Owens, in crisp whites. The attache narrowed her eyes and looked closely at him, then at Blair, before nodding. She inclined her head to a U.S. Army general’s at her side. Then brought him over, towing him through the throng. Dan caught the glare of four stars on his shoulders. The matching dazzle of shaven temples beneath his cap, a Ranger patch, and incongruous horn-rimmed glasses. Dan recognized him as one of the speakers—one of the brief ones.
“Dan.”
“Captain. Blair, meet Captain Carol Owens, naval attache to the Republic of Korea.”
They shook hands. Owens introduced Mark Harlen, U.S. Army, Commander, Combined Forces Command, and Commander, U.S. Forces Korea. Which made him both the senior U.S. officer in theater and the representative of the UN Command. As a civilian appointee in the Department of Defense hierarchy, Blair was a four-star equivalent. She and the general were equals, but they were on Harlen’s turf. It felt like the Field of Cloth of Gold, two high potentates, wary, surrounded by their subordinates.
“I know General Harlen,” Blair said. “I think we met briefly last time you were in the building to brief the SecDef.”
“And I know of the Honorable Ms. Titus.” Harlen chuckled, but there was no humor in his eyes. He glanced at Dan, returned his salute, then stuck out a hand to him too. “And if this isn’t your aide, it must be your husband.”
Too late, Dan realized that if Nick Niles had sent him to TAG to get him out of the sights of the U.S. Army’s senior commanders, this might not be the wisest venue to show himself off. Blair’s warning glance told him she was thinking along the same lines. But he couldn’t deny his identity when he was wearing his name tag. “Uh, pleased to meet you, General,” he said, and caught himself just before he bowed.
“Take it easy, Commander,” Harlen said, but he didn’t say what Dan was to take it easy from. “Ms. Titus. Time for a quick
tour of the DMZ? As long as you’re on the peninsula?”
“I could check with my aide. The schedule’s not all that flexible, though. I have to be back in DC Tuesday at 09.”
“Three or four hours. An hour up from Pusan to Osan or K16 in Seoul, thirty minutes by helo to the DMZ, an hour on the ground, thirty minutes back. Most of our DVs leave from Osan. I’d like to bend your ear on a couple of personnel issues.”
“I’d like very much to have your views.”
“And perhaps we could discuss the transfer of wartime control of South Korean troops.”
“That would be a Joint Staff issue, I believe.” Blair deflected Harlen so smoothly Dan barely caught it. “I’m aware of the question, but we’d need to study it thoroughly before floating anything concrete. The United Nations would be involved too—your UN Command hat. But I’d be glad to discuss it with you, unofficially. If, as I say, we can make the time.”
Dan felt left out, out of place. He glanced around and found himself face-to-face with Min Jun Jung. The commodore was in whites and it took a moment to recognize him. His PhotoGrays were black in the bright sunlight, and his eyes were totally invisible. They shook hands.
“Why, Dan. I didn’t expect to run into you here. You do get around, don’t you?”
“Good afternoon, Commodore. Nice to see you.”
“Nice to see you too. This is your wife, I understand?”
“I’ll introduce you as soon as she’s done with General Harlen.”
“I hadn’t really understood. She is the secretary of defense?”
“No, no! Just the undersecretary for manpower and personnel.”
“Still, that is news to me.” Dan watched Jung mull it over, then look at him again. “I thought I’d ask you your opinion. On getting under way tomorrow.”
“The typhoon?”
“Exactly. It’s moving slowly just now, but the forecasts show it passing south of us.”
“They’re not always predictable,” Dan said. “Or at least I’ve found it to be that way. Both typhoons and hurricanes. And they tend to turn north. This side of the equator, anyway.”