The Enemy

phone.”
    “I lost your Beretta,” I said.
    “Where?”
    “Somewhere it’s going to take a bunch of archaeologists a hundred years to find.”
    “Is my Humvee OK?”
    “Better than Marshall’s,” I said.
    I found my bag and an empty VOQ room and took a long hot shower. Then I transferred all my pocket stuff to a new set of BDUs and trashed the damaged ones. I figured any quartermaster would agree they were deteriorated beyond reasonable future use. I sat on the bed for a while. Just breathed in, breathed out. Then I walked back to Franz’s place. I found Summer there. She was looking radiant. She was holding a new file folder that already had a lot of pages in it.
    “We’re on track,” she said. “JAG Corps says the arrests were righteous.”
    “Did you lay out the case?”
    “They say they’ll need confessions.”
    I said nothing.
    “We have to meet with the prosecutors tomorrow,” she said. “In D.C.”
    “You’ll have to do it,” I said. “I won’t be around.”
    “Why not?”
    I didn’t answer.
    “You OK?”
    “Are Vassell and Coomer talking?”
    She shook her head. “They haven’t said a word. JAG Corps is flying them to Washington tonight. They’ve been assigned lawyers.”
    “There’s something wrong,” I said.
    “What?”
    “It’s been way too easy.”
    I thought for a moment.
    “We need to get back to Bird,” I said. “Right now.”

    Franz lent me fifty bucks and gave me two blank travel vouchers. I signed them and Leon Garber countersigned them even though he was thousands of miles away in Korea. Then Franz drove us back to LAX. He used a staff car because his Humvee was full of Marshall’s blood. Traffic was light and it was a fast trip. We went in and I swapped the vouchers for seats on the first flight to D.C. I checked my bag. I didn’t want to carry it this time. We took off at three o’clock in the afternoon. We had been in California eight hours exactly.

twenty-four
    Flying east the time zones stole back the hours we had gained going west. It was eleven o’clock at night at Washington National when we landed. I reclaimed my duffel from the carousel and we took the shuttle to the long-term lot. The Chevy was waiting there right where we left it. I used some of Franz’s fifty bucks and we filled the tank. Then Summer drove us back to Bird. She went as fast as always and took the same old route, down I-95. Past the State Police barracks, the place where the briefcase was found, the rest area, the cloverleaf, the motel, the lounge bar. We were timed in through Fort Bird’s main gate at three in the morning. The post was quiet. There was a night mist clamped down all over it. Nothing was stirring.
    “Where to?” Summer said.
    “The Delta station,” I said.
    She drove us around to the old prison gates and the sentry let us in. We parked in their main lot. I could see Trifonov’s red Corvette in the darkness. It was all on its own, near the wall with the water hose. It looked very clean.
    “Why are we here?” Summer said.
    “We had a very weak case,” I said. “You made that point yourself. And you were right. It was very weak. The forensics with the staff car helped, but we never really got beyond purely circumstantial stuff. We can’t actually put Vassell and Coomer and Marshall at any of the scenes. Not definitively. We can’t prove Marshall ever actually touched the crowbar. We can’t prove he didn’t actually eat the yogurt for a snack. And we certainly can’t prove that Vassell and Coomer ever actually ordered him to do anything. If push came to shove, they could claim Marshall was an out-of-control lone wolf.”
    “So?”
    “We walked in and confronted two senior officers who were doubly insulated from a very weak and circumstantial case. What should have happened?”
    “They should have fought it.”
    I nodded. “They should have scoffed at it. They should have laughed it off. They should have gotten offended. They should have threatened and blustered. They should have thrown us out on our asses. But they didn’t do any of that. They just sat still for it. And their silence kind of pled themselves guilty. That was my impression. That’s how I took it.”
    “Me too,” Summer said. “Certainly.”
    “So why didn’t they fight?”
    She was quiet for a spell.
    “Guilty consciences?” she said.
    I shook my head. “Spare me.”
    She was quiet a moment longer.
    “Shit,” she said. “Maybe they’re just waiting. Maybe