The Detachment

your strings. Chase after his promises, if you want. Eventually, you’ll die trying. Or, you can recognize what’s going on here, preempt the threat, and walk away clean with twenty-five million apiece in the process.”
    Treven had the sick sense that he had been turned into a bystander on all of this. Kill Finch? Turn on Hort? No one was asking him what he thought. And the truth was, he wasn’t sure himself.
    He couldn’t disagree with Larison’s analysis of the current state of play—after all, he knew firsthand how manipulative and ruthless Hort could be. And the points Larison had made about the security video placing Treven at a murder scene were persuasive, too. If Larison was right, the choice was pretty straightforward: kill or be killed.
    Still, the thought of taking out Hort made him anxious, almost dizzy. Could he really do this? To his own commander? He tried to think of it as a fragging, like what enlisted men had sometimes done to incompetent lieutenants in Vietnam. But when he imagined himself putting a round into Hort’s forehead, the neat hole, the momentary pressure bulge of the eyes from cavitation in the cranium, the instantaneous loss of expression from the face and rigidity from the body…something inside him rebelled.
    What would he do afterward? Hort would be replaced, naturally, but it was hard to imagine things ever going back to the way they were. He was afraid he would have committed a kind of patricide, that he’d be tormented by conscience, that his fellow elite soldiers would sense he’d committed some primordial sin, maybe even suspect precisely what it was. He’d bear the mark of Cain, always suspect, forever an outsider.
    No. He wasn’t like Larison and Rain, and he didn’t want to be. He’d done his share of killing, most of it at close quarters, but except when it had been self-defense, it had always been under orders. He was part of something, why would he fuck that up? And who was Larison, anyway? A skilled operator, no doubt, but still, a loose cannon, a rogue. And Rain was beginning to strike him as a borderline sociopath. Dox was a buffoon, too dumb to know better. They did what they did for money, which meant they could always be bought. Had he really been considering turning on Hort, turning on the unit, to throw in his lot forever with this group of burnouts?
    And then suddenly, he saw a way through this. A way to protect himself, stay on the inside, and get clear of Rain, Larison, and Dox. All at the same time.
    “You might be right,” Rain said, over the sounds of the train. “But still, I want to finish Finch. That’s what I was hired to do, and I’m not in the habit of turning on a client just for a better payday, even a much better one. If you and Treven want in, we’ll split the fee three hundred apiece. Otherwise Dox and I can handle it alone, and we walk away with no hard feelings.”
    Larison said, “You’re making a mistake.”
    “Do you want in on Finch?” Rain said.
    Larison looked away for a moment as though considering. Then he said, “What would you do if you found out Hort is lying to us about Shorrock and Finch? About what all this is about?”
    Rain said nothing.
    “Yeah,” Larison said. “I thought so. All right, I’m in on Finch. Because soon enough, you’ll be in on Hort.”

    Later, after they’d split up, Treven did a long surveillance detection run. When he was sure he was alone, he used a payphone at a gas station to call Hort. Hort picked up with a typically noncommittal, “Yes?”
    “It’s me,” Treven said.
    There was a pause, then, “It’s good to hear your voice, son. Nice work in Las Vegas.”
    “That wasn’t me so much.”
    “Could you have done it with fewer players?”
    “Probably not, no.”
    “Then it couldn’t have been done without you. Which is why I wanted you to be a part of it in the first place.”
    Treven didn’t answer. He felt like he’d arrived at a fork in the road. Whichever way he went, there’d be no turning back. Ever.
    “What’s on your mind, son?” Hort said.
    Treven took a deep breath. “There’s something you need to know,” he said.

Faced with intractable national problems on one hand, and an energetic and capable military on the other, it can be all too seductive to start viewing the military as a cost-effective solution.
—The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012, Charles J. Dunlap
I am beginning to think the only way the national government can do