by Bing West
Good? Good? The general pictured American helicopters taking off, tanks blocking road crossings, satellite cameras zooming in—all because of this papak, this idiot.
“Get him out of here, now. He’s not to know you’re part of this command. Get across the border and release him. Go away. Get out.”
The general turned away. He had weathered the Tito years, outlasted that lunatic Milosevic, outfoxed the Americans at Dayton. The first of his family to have a villa along the Amalfi, an apartment in Prague. He wasn’t going to be brought down by this brute’s stupidity. Was he responsible for the bull in heat, for the weather in December? This wasn’t his business.
THE WATERGATE CONDOMINIUMS, WASHINGTON, D.C.
The secure phone to the White House rang with a discreet purr, a courtesy to the mates of high level officials who relished being summoned at any hour. Political power was more a narcotic than an aphrodisiac. The White House Chief of Staff, a large, balding man, glanced at the Caller I.D. and lifted the receiver, while his wife fluffed her pillow and continued to slumber.
“Plane crash or terrorists?” He prided himself on his crisp manner, his voice abrupt even at seven on a Sunday morning.
“Good morning to you too,” the Secretary of Defense said. “Don’t be so grumpy.”
“OK, so how many did we lose?”
“Less serious, a Marine missing in Kosovo. May be kidnapped.”
“We still have people there? And that’s it—one missing?”
“Want me to add Armageddon?” the SecDef said. “I’m called when this stuff happens, and I call the White House. Now that you’re awake, you can go to church. My good deed, like spotting you a couple of points.”
“Don’t let one lucky squash game go to your head,” the Chief of Staff said. “OK, at least it’s not a reporter or a spook or something with a press angle. I’ll tell the President after he’s up. When he was governor, I didn’t wake him every time a cop had a bad day and I’m not going to start unloading small stuff now. What’s the next step?”
“We’re searching. We don’t know who has him.”
“Damn, this is bad timing. We have to keep the decks clear for the health bill.”
“Right, it’s an HMO plot to shift votes,” the SecDef said.
“All I’m saying is we have to stick to our game plan. It took a year to get back on track after the Twin Towers,” the Chief of Staff said. “Every military incident can’t end up at the Oval Office. We’ve agreed the domestic agenda is the focus for the next Congress. You’ll keep this across the river?”
“It’ll be managed from Brussels or Kosovo.”
“Good, the farther away, the better. It’s a distraction,” the Chief of Staff said, “and we can’t do anything to help from here.”
25TH MARINE REGIMENT, MITROVICA VALLEY
NOON, 21 DECEMBER
The security patrols for the meeting were to the north, inside the two-kilometer Red Zone marking the Kosovo-Serb border. To the south, the highway followed the river toward the open valley and the railhead at Pristina. There was a downward pitch to the road, as it paralleled the river rushing through ravines and gullies carved out of the limestone hills by centuries of spring snow thaws and heavy fall rains. Returning to the brigade compound the road was deceptively steep, and most trucks shifted into a lower gear. So did the three Marines running uphill with rifles slung over their right shoulders. They ran along the shoulder of the road, taking short, choppy strides at a fast shuffle, faces down, concentrating on a steady, grinding pace, no wasted motion, their boots barely clearing the surface of the thin snow.
They wore soft covers, not the German-style helmets adapted by the Americans, and none had on the flak jackets required of all U.S. troops outside the base. The three ran as if connected by a giant elastic band, sometimes stretching apart, then snapping back into a tight triangle. Each had an ALICE pack on his back, plus a large canvas water sack with a long, strawlike tube so he could drink as he ran. They were running up the grade, not jogging, the strain showing on their faces and in their stiff, quick stutter-steps.
They had left the base after full light, not wanting to be hit in the early-morning gloom by some bleary-eyed truck driver hauling in CDs or Gucci knockoffs or BMW parts from some chop shop in Albania. NATO forbade training in the mountains—it was too politically dangerous to train like soldiers—so the recon team had to stay on the main highway to Pristina, racing down out of the foothills to a turnaround point at twenty kilometers, then facing the grind back to the base, uphill the last ten kilometers. A full twenty-six-mile marathon carrying thirty-pound packs, four hours the target time. Not likely they could achieve that, but hey, what else to do on a Sunday?
For three hours the captain—the twin black cloth bars prominent on the lapels of his camouflage jacket—had been running with the single-minded lope of the Alpha wolf, sometimes allowing one of the other two to slip into the lead for a mile or so. As long as the lead shifted back and forth, all three stayed energized, a pack confident that together they could not be stopped.
Lang forced the pace, even when he wasn’t in the lead, pushing so that the pain in his lungs blocked out his thoughts, shut out the world. He’d first learned to do that in boarding school at thirteen, when he would sneak into the gym after study hours and lift weights until he couldn’t lift his arms, then press his face against the cold metal of his locker and cry.
How does the son of the captain of an oil tanker, with a divorced mother who never writes, fit into a New England boarding school? Work was Lang’s escape. A few classmates had snickered about his fanaticism. That subsided when, at fourteen, Lang was named starting linebacker and Cos decided to be his roommate. Mrs. Cosgrove swept him into her orbit as another son, and between sports, studies, and school breaks spent with the Cosgroves, Lang learned how to smother his loneliness. Even then, Lang punished his body to distract his mind. And now he didn’t want to think.
“Six miles to go,” Lang said, glancing at the GPS receiver held outside his breast pocket by a strip of Velcro. “Eight mikes for the last split.”
The other two said nothing, conserving oxygen. Eight minutes for a mile was excellent this late in the run, but could they hold that pace for six more miles?
Lang glanced at the sergeant clipping along feverishly at his side. Sergeant Herbert Caulder was a head shorter than Lang and looked a bit cartoonish, with a face too small for a neck and shoulders absurdly thick from too many workouts with heavy weights. He had the coiled energy of a downed power line. For Caulder, patience was torment. In the sniper championships at Lejeune, in half the allotted time, he put ten rounds into the black from the thousand-meter line, capturing first place and promotion below zone to sergeant E-5. A most unlikely sniper, he always wanted to get on with it, whatever it was. Now he was pumping his legs furiously, trying to sprint past the others, get out in front, gain the lead, get inside Lang’s mind, and slow down the pace.
The upgrade worked against his strategy. He couldn’t suck enough oxygen to open a lead. Each time he struggled ahead, Lang’s long legs would pull him even. It wasn’t fair. God should give everyone the same size legs. His pulse was at max. After the third fruitless sprint, Caulder eased off, gasping. I’m a sniper, he thought, not an antelope.
“I have a life after this death,” Caulder said, his stride shortening, “I’m reining it in.”
His face was pasty gray, slick with sweat. Lang slowed, trotting beside Caulder for several seconds, watching him. The third Marine did likewise. He was as tall as Lang and, like Caulder, had the three black chevrons of a sergeant on his lapels. He reached out and pulled Caulder to a halt.
“That’s it. You’re done,” he said. “Two pitchers last night, dummy. Drinking’s not your thing.”
Caulder didn’t reply. He leaned over and vomited as his companions jumped back.
“That’s good. Solid test. I hope the monitors caught that,” the other sergeant said. “You should have seen him at Tun
Tavern last night, sir. Standing on his head with a shot glass in his teeth, ass in the air. The troops were barking. The colonel was laughing. Totally embarrassing.”
Caulder breathed deeply and stood erect. “Don’t listen to him, sir. Last night was a glorious moment. We’re the dogs. No one can run with the big dogs.”
“Drinking upside down?” Lang said.
“My old man owned a bar,” Caulder said. “Learned that trick when I was ten. Some Saturday nights I’d get twenty bucks in quarter tips.”
“Now you’ve learned not to drink and run,” Lang said. “Sure you’re old enough to drink?”
He flagged down a passing hummer, gesturing as though hailing a cab in New York City. After eleven weeks in Kosovo, everyone in the regiment knew all the officers. The humvee driver agreed to take Caulder back to the base.
Lang and the other sergeant resumed the run, matching each other stride for stride, agreeing to deduct a minute from their elapsed time because they had been so solicitous of Caulder.
“Caulder’s crazy enough to take off after us, sir,” the sergeant said. “He doesn’t know he’s nuts.”
“Right,” Lang said. “Let’s pick it up, Blade. That way Caulder can’t catch up and totally dehydrate.”
In New York City, the reserves trained on the Combat Decision Range—a computer program which played combat missions. Sergeant Paul Enders made the right decisions so fast that throughout the regiment, he was called Blade. His hard body and relaxed manner—and family connections—had earned him an expanding clientele as a personal trainer to New Yorkers rich enough to be encouraged to sweat. Five hours of aerobics and weights a day gave Blade an advantage over the other recon reservists. And that’s what he lived for—the weekend missions, the four hundred mile adventure races, the team against the elements.
His father the banker was forever urging him to stop wasting a first-class mind, chiding that five years ago he had wanted to be a ski instructor and now it was this “Marine Corps business”—another passing fad. Blade knew he was the classic spoiled only-child from East Side wealth, everything coming too easily. Except this. Making the team hadn’t been easy. Still, this wouldn’t last. Doc Evans said the experiment would be over after the deployment. If the team broke up, maybe he’d apply in January—Williams, Columbia, possibly Lewis & Clark, the flower-child college. He smiled, thinking of his dad’s face going red. But now he had a race to run.
Even for Blade, the pace was harsh and he looked sideways at Lang, trying to read his expression. The captain was a big man, larger than Blade, with a body shaped by decades of weights, runs, and solitary weekends. His face was long, with the marathoner’s anemic lack of flesh, cheekbones pulled taut like a bird of prey. His tight haircut exposed the back of his head, flat as the bottom of an iron, a gift from a mother who never picked him up or shifted him in his crib.
Around another bend they went, giving each other room, neither hogging the spots where the footing was firmer. Blade was determined not to let Lang gain a step. If Blade fell back, Lang would pick up the pace, sap his confidence, break his will to win.
Worked the other way too. Hell, the skipper was an old man, over thirty, and ten pounds heavier. That Lang won at long distance, as Blade saw it, was due to mental harassment. Lang distracted you, made some weird comment about a hot new actress or the Jets, took your head out of the game. Only not today. Sooner or later, he could beat Lang, he was sure of it.
Blade knew he couldn’t think too much about Lang, who had been acting strange all morning. He had to run his own race, force the captain to worry about him, not the other way around. He wondered when Lang would try to unnerve him. Oh-oh, he was doing it to himself, letting his mind drift. Concentrate.
“Let’s do seven thirties,” Lang said.
“Let’s not,” Blade said. They were training, for God’s sake, not trying to break their bodies. Seven and a half minutes for a mile, with a pack on? After twenty miles? Forget it. His lungs felt like a blast furnace. “We can’t hold that pace. It’ll take us a week to bounce back.”
He looked at Lang. Lang sped up without replying or turning his head. He’s in his own world, Blade thought, I don’t exist. He looked back to where the hummer was trailing them, three hundred meters behind. Caulder, plodding next to the vehicle, fluttered his hand, palm down, signaling Blade to fall back. Blade shook his head no.
Lang unslung his heavy rifle and held it at port arms, left hand under the barrels, right hand over the stock. It was an experimental design, ugly, with too much weight in the barrels. This is it, Blade thought, Lang’s latest psyche trick. Blade reached for the sling of his M16A3, with its bulky telescopic sight, and imitated Lang—left hand under the barrel, right hand over the black stock aft of the trigger housing. Now they were even.
Lang didn’t challenge Blade to exhaust himself, just lengthened his own stride, looked at the dull gray rock slabs bordering the road, and set off to punish his body. Wherever his mind was, it wasn’t on the road.
“Caulder’s on the road, skipper,” Blade said. “I’m dropping back with him. I can’t hold this. You got it today, but you’re going to be whipped for a week.”
Lang nodded, without breaking stride or looking to the side, in his own world. The run was a tunnel and the light at the end was the base gate. Four miles. For thirty more minutes of fire in the lungs, he could run away from what was hurting him.
Blade dropped to a slow jog, letting Caulder catch up. They were professionals out for a workout. They could go the distance when they had to, and they knew when to back off.
Lang hit the main gate in under four hours and slowed to a jog, then a walk, circling near the guard gate, waiting for the others. The base looked like a mini high-rise complex set inside a maximum security prison, with its perimeter of guard towers, berms, and chain-link fences topped with curled rolls of razor barbed wire.
“Did you do it?” Blade asked, when he trotted up several minutes later.
“Yes.” There was no enthusiasm in Lang’s voice. The other two wanted to tell him they were impressed, but the captain held himself at a distance.
“Doc will want your time,” Blade said, looking at his watch. “I’ll send it to her.”
“Three fifty-seven,” Lang said, sounding flat. “See you in the mess hall.”
Lang walked the few blocks to his brick and mortar BOQ room, opened the portable fridge, and guzzled down a quart of Gatorade. There were two narrow beds in the room, one with a footlocker shoved at the end for Lang to rest his heels, and two scratched metal bureaus with too many books and pictures piled on top. One was a black-and-white photo of a striking woman in her midfifties, with long hair, high cheekbones, a bright smile, and light eyes which shone with warmth and intelligence, leopard eyes. A gentle leopard.
Lang looked at the photo, at a stuffed duffel bag lying askew on the bed next to his, at the whitewashed cinder-block walls, and back at the photo. For a moment his shoulders slumped. He didn’t know why it was hitting him so hard. Seventeen years, that’s why. He’d been going to the Cosgrove home for seventeen years. So maybe he should go home now with Cos. And leave the team behind? That was bright. Cos would keep him informed. She’d already fought it for a year; he’d see her next month. He didn’t want to think about it.
He stripped off his sopping clothes, walked into the tiny bathroom and vomited. He felt his insides rush, voided himself, flushed, left the bathroom for a second bottle of Gatorade, returned and vomited a second time. Too weak to stand, he lay facedown on the cold tiles, weight on his chest and forehead, his overheated body glad for the cold.
When his body had cooled down, he showered, gulped a third quart of Gatorade, and cleaned his ugly rifle, with its two barrels, twin magazine holders, and heavy optical sight. Then he walked slowly to the mess hall.
It was after eleven and the cavernous room, with its shatterproof glass windows and tables bolted to the floor, was nearly empty. The three of them sat at a long table,
a dozen glasses with different liquids spread out, trays heaped with sausages and eggs. Caulder had bounced back and was wolfing down the eggs. Blade and Lang were too exhausted to eat much.
“Staff Sergeant Roberts sleeping in again?” Lang asked. “Second Sunday in a row.”
The Sunday runs were optional. Still, the absence of a team member was unusual.
“Maybe he sensed you were going to go wild, sir,” Blade said.
The excuse was flat but Lang didn’t pursue it. They were enlisted and he was the commanding officer, but that wasn’t why they were holding back. You couldn’t choose your parents or where you lived. And if you didn’t go to college, forget about becoming an officer. But who chose to become a Marine, who went recon, who liked going thirty hours with no sleep on two canteens to reach a checkpoint eighty miles away while the wind cut like a whip—who became one of the dogs—that you decided for yourself.
They were a team. If the staff sergeant was off somewhere, that was like your older brother not showing up for dinner. When your father asked where he was, who’d ever answer that question?
Caulder changed the subject.
“Me and Blade are hitting the souk, sir. Wrap up our Christmas shopping,” Caulder said. “You and Captain Cosgrove want to come along?”
“Meaning will our Intelligence Officer get a hummer for you?”
“That would help.”
“Cosgrove’s on security patrol,” Lang said. “Then he’s leaving on tonight’s flight to Dover. His mother’s been readmitted. So the souk’s out.”
The sergeants said nothing for a moment. The team, together for two years, had talked with Mrs. Cosgrove a dozen times, at parties, marathons, training exercises. They considered her good people, always interested in what they were doing. She never said it, but they sensed she gave them high marks. Especially nice from a professor, finely dressed, with a striking face and a direct gaze. She stared into their eyes when she asked questions in a clipped accent which made each word stand up straight. She really wanted to hear their answers, and as each man replied, he stood a little taller, like her words, his muscles swelling a bit under his trim uniform.