Second Son (2 page)

Stan met his family off the plane at the Futenma air station and they took a taxi to a bungalow he had found half a mile from the beach. It was hot and still inside and it fronted on a narrow concrete street with ditches either side. The street was dead straight and lined with small houses set close together, and at the end of it was a blue patch of ocean. By that point the family had lived in maybe forty different places, and the move-in routine was second nature. The boys found the second bedroom and it was up to them to decide whether it needed cleaning. If so, they cleaned it themselves, and if not, they didn’t. In this case, as usual, Joe found something to worry about, and Reacher found nothing. So he left Joe to it, and he headed for the kitchen, where first he got a drink of water, and then he got the bad news.

Reacher’s parents were side by side at the kitchen counter, studying a letter his mother had carried all the way from Guam. Reacher had seen the envelope. It was something to do with the education system. His mother said, “You and Joe have to take a test before you start school here.”

Reacher said, “Why?”

“Placement,” his father said. “They need to know how well you’re doing.”

“Tell them we’re doing fine. Tell them thanks, but no thanks.”

“For what?”

“I’m happy where I am. I don’t need to skip a grade. I’m sure Joe feels the same.”

“You think this is about skipping a grade?”

“Isn’t it?”

“No,” his father said. “It’s about holding you back a grade.”

“Why would they do that?”

“New policy,” his mother said. “You’ve had very fragmented schooling. They need to check you’re ready to advance.”

“They never did that before.”

“That’s why it’s called a new policy. As opposed to an old policy.”

“They want
Joe
to take a test? To prove he’s ready for the next grade? He’ll freak out.”

“He’ll do OK. He’s good with tests.”

“That’s not the point, mom. You know what he’s like. He’ll be insulted. So he’ll make himself score a hundred percent. Or a hundred and ten. He’ll drive himself nuts.”

“Nobody can score a hundred and ten percent. It’s not possible.”

“Exactly. His head will explode.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’ll be OK.”

“Will you try hard?”

“What’s the pass mark?”

“Fifty percent, probably.”

“Then I’ll aim for fifty-one. No point wasting effort. When is it?”

“Three days from now. Before the semester starts.”

“Terrific,” Reacher said. “What kind of an education system doesn’t know the meaning of a simple word like
vacation
?”

Reacher went out to the concrete street and looked at the patch of ocean in the distance up ahead. The East China Sea, not the Pacific. The Pacific lay in the other direction. Okinawa was one of the Ryuku Islands, and the Ryuku Islands separated the two bodies of water.

There were maybe forty homes between Reacher and the water on the left hand side of the street, and another forty on the right. He figured the homes closer to him and further from the sea would be off-post housing for Marine families, and the homes further from him and nearer the water would be locally owned, by Japanese families who lived there full-time. He knew how real estate worked.
Just steps to the beach
. People competed for places like that, and generally the military let the locals have the best stuff. The DoD always worried about friction. Especially on Okinawa. The air station was right in the center of Genowan, which was a fair-sized city. Every time a transport plane took off, the schools had to stop teaching for a minute or two, because of the noise.

He turned his back on the East China Sea and walked inland, past identical little houses, across a four-way junction, into a perfect rectilinear matrix of yet more identical
houses. They had been built quick and cheap, but they were in good order. They were meticulously maintained. He saw small doll-like local ladies on some of the porches. He nodded to them politely, but they all looked away. He saw no local Japanese kids. Maybe they were in school already. Maybe their semester had already started. He turned back and a hundred yards later found Joe out on the streets, looking for him.

Joe said, “Did they tell you about the test?”

Reacher nodded. “No big deal.”

“We have to pass.”

“Obviously we’ll pass.”

“No, I mean we have to really
pass
this thing. We have to crush it. We have to knock it out of the park.”

“Why?”

“They’re trying to humiliate us, Reacher.”

“Us? They don’t even know us.”

“People like us. Thousands of us. We have to humiliate them back. We have to make them embarrassed they even thought of this idea. We have to piss all over their stupid test.”

“I’m sure we will. How hard can it be?”

Joe said, “It’s a new policy, so it might be a new kind of test. There might be all kinds of new things in it.”

“Like what?”

“I have no idea. There could be anything.”

“Well, I’ll do my best with it.”

“How’s your general knowledge?”

“I know that Mickey Mantle hit .303 ten years ago. And .285 fifteen years ago. And .300 twenty years ago. Which averages out to .296, which is remarkably close to his overall career average of .298, which has to mean something.”

“They’re not going to ask about Mickey Mantle.”

“Who, then?”

Joe said, “We need to know. And we have a right to know. We need to go up to that school and ask what’s in this thing.”

Reacher said, “You can’t do that with tests. That’s kind of opposite to the point of tests, don’t you think?”

“We’re at least entitled to know what part or parts of which curriculum is being tested here.”

“It’ll be reading and writing, adding and subtracting. Maybe some dividing if we’re lucky. You know the drill. Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s an insult.”

Reacher said nothing.

The Reacher brothers walked back together, across the four-way junction, and into the long concrete street. Their new place was ahead and on the left. In the distance the sliver of sea glowed pale blue in the sun. There was a hint of white sand. Maybe palm trees. Between their place and the sea there were kids out on the street. All boys. Americans, black and white, maybe two dozen of them. Marine families. Neighbors. They were clustered outside their own places, at the cheap end of the street, a thousand steps from the beach.

Reacher said, “Let’s go take a look at the East China Sea.”

Joe said, “I’ve seen it before. So have you.”

“We could be freezing our butts off in Korea all winter.”

“We were just on Guam. How much beach does a person need?”

“As much as a person can get.”

“We have a test in three days.”

“Exactly. So we don’t have to worry about it today.”

Joe sighed and they walked on, past their own place, toward the sliver of blue. Ahead of them the other kids saw them coming. They got up off curbstones and stepped over ditches and kicked and scuffed their way to the middle of the road. They formed up in a loose arrowhead, facing front, arms folded, chests out, more than twenty guys, some of them as young as ten, some of them a year or two older than Joe.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

The point man was a thick-necked bruiser of about sixteen. He was smaller than Joe, but bigger than Reacher. He was wearing a Corps T-shirt and a ragged pair of khaki pants. He had fat hands, with knuckles that dipped in, not stuck out. He was fifteen feet away, just waiting.

Joe said quietly, “There are too many of them.”

Reacher said nothing.

Joe said, “Don’t start anything. I mean it. We’ll deal with this later, if we have to.”

Reacher smiled. “You mean after the test?”

“You need to get serious about that test.”

They walked on. Forty different places. Forty different welcomes to forty different neighborhoods. Except that the welcomes had not been different. They had all been the same. Tribalism, testosterone, hierarchies, all kinds of crazy instincts. Tests of a different kind.

Joe and Reacher stopped six feet from the bruiser and waited. The guy had a boil on his neck. And he smelled pretty bad. He said, “You’re the new kids.”

Joe said, “How did you figure that out?”

“You weren’t here yesterday.”

“Outstanding deduction. You ever thought of a career with the FBI?”

The bruiser didn’t answer that. Reacher smiled. He figured he could land a left hook right on the boil. Which would hurt like hell, probably.

The bruiser said, “You going to the beach?”

Joe said, “Is there a beach?”

“You know there’s a beach.”

“And you know where we’re going.”

“This is a toll road.”

Joe said, “What?”

“You heard. You have to pay the toll.”

“What’s the toll?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” the bruiser said. “When I see what you’ve got, I’ll know what to take.”

Joe didn’t answer.

The guy said, “Understand?”

Joe said, “Not even a little bit.”

“That’s because you’re a retard. You two are the retard kids. We heard all about you. They’re making you take the retard test, because you’re retards.”

Reacher said, “Joe, now
that’s
an insult.”

The big guy said, “So the little retard talks, does he?”

Joe said, “You seen that new statue in the square in Luzon?”

“What about it?”

“The last kid who picked a fight with my brother is buried in the pedestal.”

The guy looked at Reacher and said, “That doesn’t sound very nice. Are you a psycho retard?”

Reacher said, “What’s that?”

“Like a psychopath.”

“You mean do I think I’m right to do what I do and feel no remorse afterward?”

“I guess.”

Reacher said, “Then yes, I’m pretty much a psychopath.”

Silence, except for a distant motorbike. Then two motorbikes. Then three. Distant, but approaching. The big kid’s gaze jumped to the four-way junction at the top of the street. Behind him the arrowhead formation broke up. Kids wandered back to the curbs and their front yards. A bike slowed and turned into the street and puttered slowly along. On it was a Marine in BDUs. No helmet. An NCO, back from the base, his watch finished. He was followed by two more, one of them on a big Harley. Disciplinarian dads, coming home.

The big kid with the boil said, “We’ll finish this another time.”

Joe said, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Reacher said nothing.

Stan Reacher was a quiet man by nature, and he was quieter than ever at breakfast on the fourth morning of his new command, which was turning out to be a tough gig. Back in the States the presidency had changed hands a little prematurely, and the Joint Chiefs had scrambled to present the new guy with a full range of options for his review. Standard practice. The start of every new administration was the same. There were plans for
every imaginable theoretical contingency, and they had all been dusted off. Vietnam was effectively over, Korea was a stalemate, Japan was an ally, the Soviet Union was the same as ever, so China was the new focus. There had been a lot of public hoo-hah about detente, but equally there had been a lot of private planning for war. The Chinese were going to have to be beaten sooner or later, and Stan Reacher was going to have to play his part. He had been told so on his second morning.

He had been given command of four rifle companies and he had been handed a top-secret file defining their mission, which was to act as the tip of an immense spear that would land just north of Hangzhou and then punch through clockwise to isolate Shanghai. Tough duty. Casualty estimates were frightening. But ultimately a little pessimistic, in Stan’s opinion. He had met his men and he had been impressed. On Okinawa it was always hard to avoid mental comparisons with the ghosts of the freak Marine generation that had been there thirty years before, but the current crop was good. Real good. They all shared Stan’s personal allegiance to the famous old saying:
War is not about dying for your country. It’s about making the other guy die for his
. For the infantry it all came down to simple arithmetic. If you could inflict two casualties for every one you took, you were ahead. If you could inflict five, you were winning. Eight or ten, the prize was in the bag. And Stan felt his guys could do eight or ten, easy.

But China’s population was immense. And fanatical. They would keep on coming. Men, and then boys. Women too, probably. Boys no older than his own sons. Women like his wife. He watched them eat, and imagined husbands and fathers a thousand miles away doing the same thing. A Communist army would draft a kid Joe’s age without a second thought. Reacher’s age, even, especially a big kid like that. And then the women. And then the girls. Not that Stan was either sentimental or conflicted. He would put a round through anyone’s head and sleep like a baby. But these were
strange times. That was for damn sure. Having kids made you think about the future, but being a combat Marine made the future a theory, not a fact.

He had no real plans for his sons. He wasn’t that kind of a father. But he assumed they would stay military. What else did they know? In which case Joe’s brains would keep him safe. Not that there weren’t plenty of smart guys on the front lines. But Joe wasn’t a fighter. He was like a rifle built without a firing pin. He was all there physically, but there was no trigger in his head. He was like a nuclear launch console instead, full of are-you-really-sure failsafes and interlocks and sequenced buttons. He thought too much. He did it quickly, for sure, but any kind of delay or hesitation was fatal at the start of a fight. Even a split second. So privately Stan figured Joe would end up in Intelligence, and he figured he would do a pretty good job there.

His second son was a whole different can of worms. The kid was going to be huge. He was going to be an eighth of a ton of muscle. Which was a frightening prospect. The kid had come home bruised and bloodied plenty of times, but as far as Stan knew he hadn’t actually lost a fight since he was about five years old. Maybe he had never lost a fight. He had no trigger either, but not in the same way as his big brother. Joe was permanently set to safe, and Reacher was permanently jammed wide open on full auto. When he was grown, he was going to be unstoppable. A force of nature. A nightmare for somebody. Not that he ever started anything. His mother had trained him early and well. Josie was smart about things like that. She had seen the danger coming. So she had taught him never, ever, ever to start trouble, but that it was perfectly OK to react if someone else started it first. Which was a sight to see. The smart money brings a gun to a knife fight. Reacher brought a hydrogen bomb.