The Enemy

“Whose orders?” I asked her.

“General Vassell’s,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

She closed the door.

“The fifth of January,” Summer said.

“The morning after Carbone and Brubaker died,” I said.

“He knows something.”

“He wasn’t even here.”

“Why else would they hide him away afterward?”

“It’s a coincidence.”

“You don’t like coincidences.”

I nodded.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go to Germany.”

eighteen

No way was Willard about to authorize any foreign expeditions so I walked over to the Provost Marshal’s office and took a stack of travel vouchers out of the company clerk’s desk. I carried them back to my own office and signed them all with my name on the CO lines and respectable forgeries of Leon Garber’s signature on the Authorized by lines.

“We’re breaking the law,” Summer said.

“This is the Battle of Kursk,” I said. “We can’t stop now.”

She hesitated.

“Your choice,” I said. “In or out, no pressure from me.”

She said nothing.

“These vouchers won’t come back for a month or two,” I said. “By then either Willard will be gone, or we will. We’ve got nothing to lose.”

“OK,” she said.

“Go pack,” I said. “Three days.”

She left and I asked my sergeant to figure out who was next in line for acting CO. She came back with a name I recognized as the female captain I had seen in the O Club dining room. The one with the busted arm. I wrote her a note explaining I would be out for three days. I told her she was in charge. Then I picked up the phone and called Joe.

“I’m going to Germany,” I said.

“OK,” he said. “Enjoy. Have a safe trip.”

“I can’t go to Germany without stopping by Paris on the way back. You know, under the circumstances.”

He paused.

“No,” he said. “I guess you can’t.”

“Wouldn’t be right not to,” I said. “But she shouldn’t think I care more than you do. That wouldn’t be right either. So you should come over too.”

“When?”

“Take the overnight flight two days from now. I’ll meet you at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. Then we’ll go see her together.”

Summer met me on the sidewalk outside my quarters and we carried our bags to the Chevy. We were both in BDUs because we figured our best shot was a night transport out of Andrews Air Force Base. We were too late for a civilian red-eye and we didn’t want to wait all night for the breakfast flights. We got in the car and logged out at the gate. Summer was driving, of course. She accelerated hard and then dropped into a smooth rhythm that was about ten miles an hour faster than the other cars heading our way.

I sat back and watched the road. Watched the shoulders, and the strip malls, and the traffic. We drove north thirty miles and passed by Kramer’s motel. Hit the cloverleaf and jogged east to I-95. Headed north. We passed the rest area. Passed the spot a mile later where the briefcase had been found. I closed my eyes.

I slept all the way to Andrews. We got there well after midnight. We parked in a restricted lot and swapped two of our travel vouchers for two places on a Transportation Corps C-130 that was leaving for Frankfurt at three in the morning. We waited in a lounge that had fluorescent lighting and vinyl benches and was filled with the usual ragtag bunch of transients. The military is always on the move. There are always people going somewhere, any time of the night or day. Nobody talked. Nobody ever did. We all just sat there, stiff and tired and uncomfortable.

The loadmaster came to get us thirty minutes before takeoff. We filed out onto the tarmac and walked up the ramp into the belly of the plane. There was a long line of cargo pallets in the center bay. We sat on webbing jump seats with our backs to the fuselage wall. On the whole I figured I preferred the first-class section on Air France. The Transportation Corps doesn’t have stewardesses and it doesn’t brew in-flight coffee.

We took off a little late, heading west into the wind. Then we turned a slow one-eighty over D.C. and struck out east. I felt the movement. There were no windows, but I knew we were above the city. Joe was down there somewhere, sleeping.

The fuselage wall was very cold at altitude so we all leaned forward with our elbows on our knees. It was too noisy to talk. I stared at a pallet of tank ammunition until my vision blurred and I fell back to sleep. It wasn’t comfortable, but one thing you learn in the army is how to sleep anywhere. I woke up maybe ten times and spent most of the trip in a state of suspended animation. The roar of the engines and the rush of the slipstream helped induce it. It was relatively restful. It was about sixty percent as good as being in bed.

We were in the air nearly eight hours before we started our initial descent. There was no intercom. No cheery message from the pilot. Just a change in the engine note and a downward lurching movement and a sharp sensation in the ears. All around me people were standing up and stretching. Summer had her back flat against an ammunition crate, rubbing like a cat. She looked pretty good. Her hair was too short to get messy and her eyes were bright. She looked determined, like she knew she was heading for doom or glory and was resigned to not knowing which.

We all sat down again and held tight to the webbing for the landing. The wheels touched down and the reverse thrust howled and the brakes jammed on tight. The pallets jerked forward against their straps. Then the engines cut back and we taxied a long way and stopped. The ramp came down and a dim dusk sky showed through the hole. It was five o’clock in the afternoon in Germany, six hours ahead of the East Coast, one hour ahead of Zulu time. I was starving. I had eaten nothing since the burger in Sperryville the previous day. Summer and I stood up and grabbed our bags and got in line. Shuffled down the ramp with the others and out onto the tarmac. The weather was cold. It felt pretty much the same as North Carolina.

We were way out in the restricted military corner of the Frankfurt airport. We took a perso

The trip took thirty minutes. We drove east through suburbs. They looked like a lot of West German places. There were vast tracts of pale honey buildings built back in the fifties. The new neighborhoods ran west to east in random curving shapes, following the routes the bombers had followed. No nation ever lost a war the way Germany lost. Like everyone, I had seen the pictures taken in 1945. Defeat was not a big enough word. Armageddon would be better. The whole country had been smashed to powdered rubble by a juggernaut. The evidence would be there for all time, written in the architecture. And under the architecture. Every time the phone company dug a trench for a cable, they found skulls and bones and teacups and shells and rusted-out Panzerfausts. Every time ground was broken for a new foundation, a priest was standing by before the steam shovels took their first bite. I was born in Berlin, surrounded by Americans, surrounded by whole square miles of patched-up devastation. They started it, we used to say.