The Enemy

I shaved and took a shower and dressed in clean BDUs. Knocked on Summer’s door fifty-five minutes into Swan’s hour. She opened up. She looked clean and fresh. Behind her the room looked the same as mine, except it already smelled like a woman’s. There was some kind of nice eau de toilette in the air.

The O Club occupied half of one of the ground floor wings of the main building. It was a grand space, with high ceilings and intricate plaster moldings. There was a lounge, and a bar, and a dining room. We found Swan in the bar. He was with a lieutenant colonel who was wearing Class As with a combat infantryman’s badge on the coat. It was an odd thing to see, on an Armored post. His nameplate said: Simon. He introduced himself to us. I got the feeling he was going to join us for di

“Been here long?” I asked him.

“Two years,” he said, which I was glad about. I needed some background, and Swan didn’t have it, any more than I knew anything about Fort Bird. Then I realized it was no accident that Simon was joining the party. Swan must have figured out what I wanted and set about providing it without being asked. Swan was that kind of guy.

“Pleased to meet you, Colonel,” I said, and then I nodded to Swan, like I was saying thanks. We drank cold American beers from tall frosted glasses and then we went through to the dining room. Swan had made a reservation. The steward put us at a table in the corner. I sat where I could watch the whole room at once. I didn’t see anyone I knew. Vassell wasn’t around. Nor was Coomer.

The menu was absolutely standard. We could have been in any O Club in the world. O Clubs aren’t there to introduce you to local cuisine. They’re there to make you feel at home, somewhere deep inside the army’s own interpretation of America. There was a choice of fish or steak. The fish was probably European, but the steak would have been flown in across the Atlantic. Some politician in one of the ranch states would have leveraged a sweet deal with the Pentagon.

We small-talked for a spell. We bitched about pay and benefits. Talked about people we knew. We mentioned Just Cause in Panama. Lieutenant Colonel Simon told us he had been to Berlin two days previously and had gotten himself a chip of concrete from the Wall. Told us he pla

“Do you know Major Marshall?” I asked him.

“Fairly well,” he said.

“Who is he exactly?” I asked.

“Is this official?”

“Not really,” I said.

“He’s a pla

“Does he have an intelligence background?”

“Not formally. But he’ll have done rotations, I’m sure.”

“So is he a part of the i

“He’s on the team,” Simon said. “That’s for sure. But you know what flag officers are like. They need a guy, but they aren’t about to admit it. So they abuse him a little. He fetches and carries and drives them around, but when push comes to shove they ask his opinion.”

“Is he going to move up now Kramer’s gone? Maybe into Coomer’s slot?”

Simon made a face. “He should. He’s an Armor fanatic to the core, like the rest of them. But nobody really knows what the hell is going to happen. Kramer dying couldn’t have come at a worse time for them.”

“The world is changing,” I said.

“And what a world it was,” Simon said. “Kramer’s world, basically, begi

“Who?”

“Not Armored. Not the infantry. This theater is all about the Army Corps of Engineers. Sherman tanks way back weighed thirty-eight tons and were nine feet wide. Now we’re all the way up to the M1A1 Abrams, which weighs seventy tons and is eleven feet wide. Every step of the way for forty years the Corps of Engineers has had work to do. They’ve widened roads, hundreds of miles of them, all over West Germany. They’ve strengthened bridges. Hell, they’ve built roads and bridges. Dozens of them. You want a stream of seventy-ton tanks rolling east to battle, you better make damn sure the roads and bridges can take it.”

“OK,” I said.

“Billions of dollars,” Simon said. “And of course, they knew which roads and bridges to look at. They knew where we were starting, and they knew where we were going. They talked to the war-gamers, they looked at the maps, and they got busy with the concrete and the rebar. Then they built way stations everywhere we needed them. Permanent hardened fuel stores, ammunition dumps, repair shops, hundreds of them, all along strictly predetermined routes. So we’re embedded here, literally. We’re dug in, literally. The Cold War battlefields are literally set in stone, Reacher.”

“People are going to say we invested and we won.”

Simon nodded. “And they’d be correct. But what comes next?”

“More investment,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “Like in the Navy, when the big battleships were superseded by aircraft carriers. The end of one era, the begi

“They’re mobile,” Summer said. “Like any tank.”

“Not very mobile,” Simon said. “Where is the next fight going to be?”

I shrugged. I wished Joe was there. He was good at all the geopolitical stuff.

“The Middle East?” I said. “Iran or Iraq, maybe. They’ve both gotten their breath back, they’ll be looking for the next thing to do.”

“Or the Balkans,” Swan said. “When the Soviets finally collapse, there’s a forty-five-year-old pressure cooker waiting for the lid to come off.”

“OK,” Simon said. “Look at the Balkans, for instance. Yugoslavia, maybe. That’ll be the first place anything happens, for sure. Right now they’re just waiting for the starting gun. What do we do?”

“Send in the Airborne,” Swan said.

“OK,” Simon said again. “We send in the 82nd and the 101st. Lightly armed, we might get three battalions there inside a week. But what do we do after we get there? We’re speed bumps, that’s all, nothing more. We have to wait for the heavy units. And that’s the first problem. An Abrams tank weighs seventy tons. Can’t airlift it. Got to put it on a train, and then put it on a ship. And that’s the good news. Because you don’t just ship the tank. For every ton of tank, you have to ship four tons of fuel and other equipment. These suckers get a half-mile to the gallon. And you need spare engines, ammunition, huge maintenance crews. The logistics tail is a mile long. Like moving an iron mountain. To ship enough tank brigades to make a worthwhile difference, you’re looking at a six-month buildup, minimum, and that’s working right around the clock.”

“During which time the Airborne troops are deep in the shit,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” Simon said. “And those are my boys, and I worry about them. Lightly armed paratroops against any kind of foreign armor, we’d get slaughtered. It would be a very, very anxious six months. And it gets worse. Because what happens when the heavy brigades eventually get there? What happens is, they roll off the ships and they get bogged down two blocks later. Roads aren’t wide enough, bridges aren’t strong enough, they never make it out of the port area. They sit there stuck in the mud and watch the infantry getting killed far away in the distance.”