The Enemy

bad. That’s why they were so worried about the agenda getting out.”
    “But change happens. Ultimately it can’t be resisted.”
    “Nobody ever accepts that fact,” I said. “Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. Go down to the Navy Yards, and I guarantee you’ll find a million tons of fifty-year-old paper all stored away somewhere saying that battleships can never be replaced and that aircraft carriers are useless pieces of newfangled junk. There’ll have been admirals writing hundred-page treatises, putting their whole heart and soul into it, swearing blind that their way is the only way.”
    Summer said nothing.
    I smiled. “Go back in
our
records and you’ll probably find Kramer’s granddad saying that tanks can never replace horses.”
    “What exactly were they planning?”
    I shrugged. “We didn’t see the agenda. But we can make some pretty good guesses. Discrediting of key opponents, obviously. Maximum use of dirty laundry. Almost certainly collusion with defense industries. If they could get key manufacturers to say that lightweight armored vehicles can’t be made safe, that would help. They could use public propaganda. They could tell people their sons and daughters were going to be sent to war in tin cans that a peashooter could penetrate. They could try to scare Congress. They could tell them that a C-130 airlift fleet big enough to make a difference would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.”
    “That’s just standard-issue bitching.”
    “So maybe there’s more. We don’t know yet. Kramer’s heart attack made the whole thing misfire. For now.”
    “You think they’ll start it up again?”
    “Wouldn’t you? If you had everything to lose?”
    She took one hand off the wheel. Rested it in her lap. Turned slightly and looked at me.
    “So why do you want to see the Chief of Staff?” she asked. “If you’re right, then it’s the Vice-Chief who’s on your side. He brought you here. He’s the one who’s been protecting you.”
    “Game of chess,” I said. “Tug-of-war. Good guy, bad guy. The good guy brought me here, the bad guy sent Garber away. Harder to move Garber than me, therefore the bad guy outranks the good guy. And the only person who outranks the Vice-Chief is the Chief himself. They always rotate, we know the Vice-Chief is infantry, therefore we know the Chief is Armored. Therefore we know he has a stake.”
    “The Chief of Staff is the bad guy?”
    I nodded.
    “So why demand to see him?”
    “Because we’re in the army, Summer,” I said. “We’re supposed to confront our enemies, not our friends.”

    We got quieter and quieter the closer we got to D.C. I knew my strengths and my weaknesses and I was young enough and bold enough and dumb enough to consider myself any man’s equal. But getting in the Chief of Staff’s face was a whole other ball game. It was a superhuman rank. There was nothing above it. There had been three of them during my years of service and I had never met any of them. Never even seen any of them, as far as I could remember. Nor had I ever seen a Vice-Chief, or an Assistant Secretary, or any other of the smooth breed who moved in those exalted circles. They were a species apart. Something made them different from the rest of us.
    But they started out the same. I could have been one of them, theoretically. I had been to West Point, just like they had. But for decades the Point had been little more than a spit-shined engineering school. To get on the Staff track, you had to get sent on somewhere else afterward. Somewhere better. You had to go to George Washington University, or Stanford or Harvard or Yale or MIT or Princeton, or even somewhere overseas like Oxford or Cambridge in England. You had to get a Rhodes scholarship. You had to get a master’s or a Ph.D. in economics or politics or international relations. You had to be a White House Fellow. That’s where my career path diverged. Right after West Point. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a guy who was better at cracking heads than cracking books. Other people looked and saw the same thing. Pigeonholing starts on day one in the military. So they went their way and I went mine. They went to the E-ring and the West Wing, and I went to dark dim-lit alleys in Seoul and Manila. If they came to my turf, they’d be crawling on their bellies. How I was going to do on their turf remained to be seen.
    “I’m going in by myself,” I said.
    “You are not,” Summer