Cold Allies (11 page)

“Shit, that’s ... Jesus, that’s ...”

The dead soldier was a funny almond color now, and there was an expression of stunned relief on his face.

NEAR LERIDA, SPAIN

Rita clambered out of the Sikorsky and trudged cumbersomely across the tarmac. The duffel bag was weighing her down and somehow the M-16 and she kept colliding butts.

Beyond a Chinook, an absurdly petite soldier stood near a machine-gun-mounted Humvee. Helen Dix, Rita decided; and she found herself wondering if the lieutenant had a problem finding size-three BDUs.

“Capt’n Beaudreaux?” the lieutenant asked as Rita got within earshot.

It was a moment before Rita remembered to return the junior officer’s salute.

“I’m Lieutenant Dix. Glad to have you aboard,” the woman said in a Georgia-cracker drawl.

Rita’s heart sank. Lauterbach was a man of contradictions. A man who had the sense to put her in a woman’s platoon and the stupidity to forget that the officer was a redneck.

“Thanks, lieutenant. I appreciate that,” she replied, steeling herself for some good old-fashioned prejudice. “I’ll try and stay out of your way.”

Although dainty, Dix had wiry forearms that would have looked more natural on a boy. Her denim blue eyes had that long-distance stare common to front-line soldiers.

Dix blinked at Rita. Her gaze seemed to narrow its focus.

“Where you all from?” she asked.

“Louisiana originally—”

Suddenly Dix smiled. “Lordy, Lordy,” she said. “A Southerner. Thank God. Come on, Capt’n. We got us some driving to do.”

Surprised by the genuine welcome in the lieutenant’s voice, Rita climbed into the Humvee. Dix had gone shopping for her platoon, she saw. The passenger floorboard and the backseat were filled with string bags of fruit.

‘That there’s Specialist Jimmy Hoover,” Dix said, gesturing with her head in the direction of the machine gun. The young, angular Hoover was sitting with the gun between his legs.

Dix keyed the ignition, gunned the engine, and peeled rubber on her way out of the base.

“You all take your stop-up pills, ma’am?” Dix asked, taking her eyes off the road.

Rita kept hers straight ahead, figuring that at the speed they were going someone in the Humvee should be watching. “Please don’t call me ma’am,” she said in a strained voice. They took a corner too fast, the fenders brushing a yucca and a close-packed fence of blooming cactus.

“Begging the Capt’n’s pardon, but what do you want me to call you?”

“Call me Rita. Just Rita.” They were zipping down a straightaway now. A white goat barely escaped being a road kill.

“Well, Rita. You take your stop-up pills, or what? I mean, if it ain’t the worst thing that can happen getting your period in the field, it comes close.”

“No, I haven’t taken ... I mean, nobody gave me ...”

“Shit. Ain’t men all alike?” Dix asked rhetorically, reaching into her BDU blouse and bringing out a plastic bottle. ‘They just plain overlook the essentials. My old boyfriend? He used to climb my ass about spending too much money on Tampax, like crotch wicks were jewelry or something. Here. You just take one of these, sugar. There’s a canteen down there on the floorboard someplace.”

Rita took the pill bottle. She was prying the canteen loose from a bag of yellow Spanish cherries when the Humvee slowed.

Startled. Rita lifted her head. Dix was driving grim-faced now, careful not to hit the refugees massed on the side of the road.

There were hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. Old men with canes. Begrimed children holding tight to their mothers’ hands. They were walking west, all with the same blankness in their faces, all wearing the same shroud of dust. A line of migrating ghosts. The mass of people moved with the communal, dull purpose of herded cattle.

Rita stared hard at a man in a three-piece suit, a basket of clothes in his arms. Had he not looked so exhausted, so desperate she might have thought he was on his way to the laundry after a long day at work. When the Humvee passed, his eyes tracked it, hot and urgent.

“Where do they come from?” Rita asked. There were so many, it seemed all Spain was emptying.

“Little towns around here. Hey,” the lieutenant said in a bright voice. “I hear you know General Lauterbach. He as much of a hard-ass as everybody says?”

Hard-ass?
Rita wondered. Funny. She had never thought of the general that way. “Not that I’ve noticed,” Rita said.

“Huh. Maybe he’s just nicer to you than he is to his staff.”

“I’ve been told I have the general’s every confidence, whatever that means,” Rita said distantly, wondering when the march of homeless Spaniards would end.

“No, honey,” Dix laughed. “I hear he
likes
you. That he’s what the girls at Robert E. Lee High used to call ’namored on you and all.”

As she swallowed the Mens-Ex and clamped the top back on the canteen, Rita’s mind returned to the helicopter, to the touch of Lauterbach’s hand on hers. “I doubt that.”

“Well, I got it straight from Major Tubbs who got the word from Lt. Colonel Martin who heard it right from the great man himself, that we were to treat you like Steuben crystal. Ain’t that just the most romantic thing you ever heard? Steuben crystal. And here I was expecting you to be some Junior Leaguer, not some tough broad with a grenade launcher on her weapon.”

Rita frowned. “I’m simply important to the general as a researcher. That’s all that means,”

Taking her eyes from the road, the lieutenant gave Rita a sly look. “Ain’t what Lt. Colonel Martin says. Fact is, Lt. Colonel Martin understood that General Lauterbach had a particular interest in you and that your safety and well-being was paramount to the general. Paramount, he says, like if anything happened to you, the army would chew ass past my tailbone. Sugar, that may not be love, but that’s heavy like.”

Rita remembered the first time she met the general. She’d been in an aircraft hangar sorting out the bones of five men who had burned to death in an APC. Two of the bodies were drawn up in the typical burn victim’s pugilist stance. The other three were in charred-bone pieces.

She remembered she had spread out the dental charts and medical records and had just identified one body by an old spiral fracture of the tibia when someone walked into the hangar.

Hearing footsteps, she had looked up but saw nothing important about the visitor in the shadows. She returned to her task.

“You’re taking a long time with this,” the man said. “Why don’t you just approximate the way most of the other doctors do?”

She spun around. “You’ll get your IDs when I say you get your IDs. Families will be burying these bodies and they won’t want to cry over some stranger.”

He took a step forward into the floodlights and she saw two things at once: the disarming smile on his face and the four stars on his collar. “What’s your name, Captain?” the general asked pleasantly.

“Doctor,” she shot back. “Doctor Beaudreaux,”

The smile faltered. “Well. Carry on,” he said with a vague nod. Then he left the room.

It was only afterward that she realized she hadn’t saluted and that he hadn’t chastised her for that.

It’s obvious he loves me for my tact,
Rita thought.
Or my nappy hair. Or my training-bra-sized breasts.

On the way to the staging area, Rita told Lieutenant Dix of the new orders and tried to picture herself in bed with the general: him on top; her on top. None of the positions seemed to work. And ringed around the bed, the displaced civilians of Spain were looking on with their huge, empty eyes.

CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

Even after the CRAV was safe abed, Gordon sat in the black silence of the goggles, letting his nerves settle like fizz off a Coke. When he felt his legs and arms were steady, he pried off the headgear.

Ishimoto was sitting next to him.

They looked at each other. In the close quarters of the command center their knees were almost touching. Someone had installed a secondary screen on the table near the CRAV computer.

Ishimoto sat unmoving, even his breathing kept to a minimum. As spare and abstract as a haiku.

“It bothers you,” he finally said.

Gordon didn’t need an explanation. “Yeah,” he agreed.

“It bothers me.” They’d snuck into his room, rearranged his furniture, and then sat there and watched him work. He hadn’t known a thing.

“We leave impressions on all we touch,” the rep said. “I have used all five CRAVs in this place. The mark you leave on your unit is strong. That is why I think the Woofer follows you. It senses you in it. It senses your equanimity.”

Ishimoto sat back, as though to allow Gordon to digest what he had said.

Equanimity?
Gordon thought.
What the hell does equanimity mean?

“What?” he asked.

“Detachment. Tranquility,” was the reply. “One must detach oneself from the world in order to be at peace with it. You have this quality, but it is an indifference I do not understand. I follow the Eightfold Path because it has been taught to me. You follow it unknowing. It is possible that you may be a true master.”

Gordon scratched his cheek. “Huh?”

“I am Zen Buddhist,” the rep replied, his voice and his face passive. Jesus. And Ishimoto thought Gordon was tranquil. If the Japanese had been any more tranquil, he would have been asleep.

“No kidding?” said Gordon, Intrigued, “And I could be a Zen master?”

Ishimoto’s lips split into a broad smile. “No kidding.” Gordon sat back in the command chair and grinned at the boxy computer.

The Japanese stood. “You will be hungry.”

In the empty cave of Gordon’s belly an appetite awakened, a bear rousing from hibernation. “Right. Let’s go to the mess hall or something. You eaten?”

Ishimoto shook his head. “I have waited for you.”

As they left the room, Gordon glanced at Ishimoto again. “Hey. Are you all right now?”

Ishimoto raised a placid eyebrow.

“I mean, after what happened between you and the Woofer. You okay?”

It was as though a wall had come down between them, a soft wall, but it was there nevertheless.

“Yes,” he said simply.

Gordon hesitated before asking the next question. “How did it feel? What did you see?”

Ishimoto took a long, deep breath. His onyx eyes settled on Gordon. “I saw a great emptiness,” he said.

NEAR CALHAN, COLORADO

That morning the supply truck had traveled the twenty miles from Calhan out to the camp, bringing just enough food to make people hungrier. The cops had strutted around, as if the delivery was the next best trick to the loaves and fishes.

There had been a lot of cops with semiautomatic rifles, and when two men fought over a packet, the cops pulled them out to the road and shot them down in front of God and everybody, just like that.

Nobody said a word.

Jerry had seen people die before. Hell, his own Pa had sat in the truck dead an hour before Jerry finally figured out he wasn’t mad or just not in a talkative mood. But the way Jerry had been raised, it was right that there should be a respectful silence when someone passed on. Jerry had always believed death made people thoughty, like they were considering their own road to glory and worrying about sin.

One man just stood there, as though he thought the cops were kidding. The other one fell to his knees and started crawling—Jesus, crawling—toward them. Jerry would never forget the expressionless look on the cop’s face, and the way the top of the man’s head disappeared in blood and brain, like a watermelon hit with a hammer.

And he’d never forget the way the people had just stood around, looked at the bodies and then walked off, eating and passing the time of day.

Things weren’t right in the camp. It was a place where people weren’t people anymore.

As dark fell, he counted his supplies again. It didn’t take him long. Six crackers in a neat little package, and a carton of water the size of the servings of milk he used to get in school.

When it was full night, he set out into the desert, keeping his pace slow, his eyes on the Rockies. After a few minutes he came to a dry creek bed. As soon as he was over the lip of the ravine, a light hit him in the face. Blinded, squinting, he froze.

“Look what we have here,” a man said. Another man: “More Texas trash.”

Blinking in the glare, he watched two state troopers get out of their jeep and walk toward him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the first cop asked.

The second didn’t wait for an answer. “Sneaking west.

Hey! Don’t you know by now that Colorado doesn’t want you?”

Jerry bolted, but the cops were faster. A hand grabbed a fistful of his hair. The pain brought him to his knees.

“Hey, boy.” Laughter behind him. “You know what we do to assholes who try to sneak west?”

A boot hit Jerry’s thigh, toppling him the rest of the way to the dirt. Another kick in the small of his back. He sucked up powdery dust.

“Texas trash,” a cop giggled, a startlingly feminine sound, something that could have come from a teenage girl. Had the cops been drinking? When men were drunk, they pushed too hard, they hit too hard. Jerry knew what whiskey blows felt like.

Something touched him between the shoulder blades. A
zzzzt
knifed through him, front to back. It felt as though the hand of God had reached out and tried to jerk his soul from his body.