The Enemy

Corps would follow up on it. Someone probably would. Investigations were like that. They led off in all kinds of random directions.
    There were ideas for public relations campaigns. Most of them were pretty limp. These guys hadn’t mixed with the public since they took the bus up the Hudson to start their plebe year at the Point. Then there were references to the big defense contractors. There were ideas for political initiatives inside the Department of the Army and in Congress. Some of the political ideas looped right back and tied in with the defense contractor references. There were hints of some pretty sophisticated relationships there. Clearly money flowed one way and favors flowed the other way. The Secretary of Defense was mentioned by name. His help was taken pretty much for granted. On one line his name was actually underlined and a note in the margin read:
bought and paid for.
Altogether the first three pages were full of the kind of stuff you would expect from arrogant professionals heavily invested in the status quo. It was murky and sordid and desperate, for sure. But it wasn’t anything that would send you to jail.
    That stuff came on the fourth page.
    The fourth page had a curious heading:
T.E.P., The Extra Mile.
Underneath that was a typed quotation from
The Art of War
by Sun-tzu:
To fail to take the battle to the enemy when your back is to the wall is to perish.
Alongside that in the margin was a penciled addendum in what I guessed was Vassell’s handwriting:
While coolness in disaster is the supreme proof of a commander’s courage, energy in pursuit is the surest test of his strength of will. Wavell.
    “Who’s Wavell?” Summer said.
    “An old British field marshal,” I said. “World War Two. Then he was viceroy of India. He was blind in one eye from World War One.”
    Underneath the Wavell quote was another penciled note, in a different hand. Coomer’s, probably. It said:
Volunteers? Me? Marshall?
Those three words were ringed and connected with a long looping pencil line back to the heading:
T.E.P., The Extra Mile.
    “What’s that about?” Summer said.
    “Read on,” I said.
    Below the Sun-tzu quote was a typed list of eighteen names. I knew most of them. There were key battalion commanders from prestige infantry divisions like the 82nd and the 101st, and significant staffers from the Pentagon, and some other people. There was an interesting mix of ages and ranks. There were no really junior officers, but the list wasn’t confined to senior people. Not by any means. There were some rising stars in there. Some obvious choices, some offbeat mavericks. A few of the names meant nothing to me. They belonged to people I had never heard of. There was a guy listed called Abelson, for instance. I didn’t know who Abelson was. He had a penciled check mark against his name. Nobody else did.
    “What’s the check mark for?” Summer said.
    I dialed my sergeant outside at her desk.
    “Ever heard of a guy called Abelson?” I asked her.
    “No,” she said.
    “Find out about him,” I said. “He’s probably a light colonel or better.”
    I went back to the list. It was short, but it was easy enough to interpret. It was a list of eighteen key bones in a massive evolving skeleton. Or eighteen key nerves in a complex neurological system. Remove them, and a certain part of the army would be somewhat handicapped. Today, for sure. But more importantly it would be handicapped tomorrow too. Because of the rising stars. Because of the stunted evolution. And from what I knew about the people whose names I recognized, the part of the army that would get hurt was exclusively the part with the light units in it. More specifically, those light units that looked ahead toward the twenty-first century rather than those that looked backward at the nineteenth. Eighteen people was not a large number, in a million-man army. But it was a superbly chosen sample. There had been some acute analysis going on. Some precision targeting. The movers and the shakers, the thinkers and the planners. The bright stars. If you wanted a list of eighteen people whose presence or absence would make a difference to the future, this was it, all typed and tabulated.
    My phone rang. I hit
Speaker
and we heard my sergeant’s voice.
    “Abelson was the Apache helicopter guy,” she said. “You know, the attack helicopters? The gunships? Always beating that particular drum?”
    “Was?” I said.
    “He died the day before New