The Enemy

their woodland greens. They still looked like Rotary Club members. Vassell was still bald and Coomer was still wearing eyeglasses.
    They both looked up at me.
    I took a breath.
    Senior officers.
    Harassment.
    It could be you that goes to jail.
    “General Vassell,” I said. “And Colonel Coomer. You are under arrest on a charge of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice in that you conspired together and with other persons to commit homicide.”
    I held my breath.
    But neither one of them had a reaction. Neither one of them spoke. They just gave it up. They just looked resigned. Like the other shoe had finally dropped and the inevitable had finally happened. Like they had been expecting this moment from the start. Like they had known for sure it was coming all along. I breathed out. There were supposed to be all kinds of stages in a person’s reaction to bad news. Grief, anger, denial. But these guys were already through all of that. That was clear. They were right there at the end of the process, butted hard up against acceptance.
    I cued Summer to complete the formalities. There were all kinds of things from the Uniform Code that you had to spell out. All kinds of advisements and warnings. Summer ran through them better than I would have. Her voice was clear and her manner was professional. Neither Vassell nor Coomer responded at all. No bluster, no pleading, no angry protestations of innocence. They just nodded obediently in all the right places. Got up out of their chairs at the end without even being told.
    “Handcuffs?” Summer asked me.
    I nodded.
    “For sure,” I said. “And walk them to the brig. All the way. Don’t put them in the truck. Let everybody see them. They’re a disgrace.”

    I got directions from a cavalry guy and took Franz’s Humvee to go get Marshall. He was supposed to be camped out in a hut near a disused range target, observing. The disused target was described to me as an obsolete Sheridan tank. It was supposed to be fairly beat-up. The hut was supposed to be in better shape and close to the old tank. I was told to stick to the established tracks to avoid unexploded ordnance and desert tortoises. If I ran over the ordnance, I would be killed. If I ran over the tortoises, I would be reprimanded by the Department of the Interior.
    I left the main post alone, at nine-thirty in the morning exactly. I didn’t want to wait for Summer. She was all tied up with processing Vassell and Coomer. I felt like we were at the end of a long journey, and I just wanted to get it over. I took a borrowed sidearm, but it was still a bad decision.

twenty-three
    Irwin owned enough of the Mojave that it could be a plausible stand-in for the vast deserts of the Middle East or, if you ignored the heat and the sand, a plausible stand-in for the endless steppes of Eastern Europe. Which meant I was long out of sight of the main post buildings before I was even a tenth of the way to the promised Sheridan tank. The terrain was completely empty all around me. The Humvee felt tiny out there. It was January so there was no heat shimmer but the temperature was still pretty high. I applied what the unofficial Humvee manual called 2-40 air-conditioning, which meant you opened two windows and drove at forty miles an hour. That set up a decent breeze. Normally forty miles an hour in a Humvee feels pretty fast because of its bulk. But out there in the vastness it felt like no speed at all.
    A whole hour later I was still doing forty and I still hadn’t found the hut. The range went on forever. Irwin was one of the world’s great military reservations. That was for sure. Maybe the Soviets had a bigger place somewhere, but I would have been surprised. Maybe Willard could have told me. I smiled to myself and kept on going. Drove over a ridge and saw an empty plain below me. A dot on the next horizon that might have been the hut. A dust cloud maybe five miles to the west that might have been tanks on the move.
    I kept to the track. Kept going at forty. Dust was trailing behind me like a tail. The air coming in the windows was hot. The plain was maybe three miles across. The dot on the horizon became a speck and then grew larger the closer I got to it. After a mile I could make out two separate shapes. The old tank on the left, and the observation hut on the right. After another mile I could make out three separate shapes. The old tank on the left, the observation hut on the right, and Marshall’s own Humvee in