The Enemy

“About-face.”
    She turned and we switched positions. We decided we would cover each three-hundred-yard section the opposite way around from the first pass. Where I had walked inboard, I would walk outboard, and vice versa. No real reason, except our perspectives were different and we felt we should alternate. I was more than a foot taller than she was, and therefore simple trigonometry meant I could see more than a foot farther in either direction. She was closer to the ground and she claimed her eyes were good for detail.
    We walked back, slow and steady.
    Nothing in the first section. We swapped positions. I took up station ten feet from the track. Scanned left and right. The wind was in our faces, and my eyes started watering from the cold. I put my hands in my pockets.
    Nothing in the second section. We changed positions again. I walked five feet from the track, parallel to its edge. Nothing in the third section. We changed yet again. I did math in my head as we walked. So far we had swept a fifteen-foot swath along a 2,340-yard length. That made 11,700 square yards, which was a hair better than two-point-four acres. Nearly two and a half acres, out of a hundred thousand. Odds of forty thousand to one, approximately. Better than driving to town and spending a dollar on a lottery ticket. But not much better.
    We walked on. The wind got stronger and we got colder. We saw nothing.
    Then I saw something.
    It was far to my right. Maybe twenty feet from me. Not a yogurt container. Something else. I almost ignored it because it was well outside the zone of possibility. No lightweight plastic unaerodynamic item could have gone that far after being thrown from a car on the track. So my eyes spotted it and my brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed basis.
    And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct.
    Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain whispered
snake
and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. The modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said,
No snakes here in January, bud. Way too cold.
I breathed out and moved on a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.
    There was a curved black shape in the dead grass. Belt? Garden hose? But it was settled deeper down among the stiff brown stalks than something made of leather or fabric or rubber could have fallen. It was right down there among the roots. Therefore it was heavy. And it had to be heavy to have traveled so far from the track. Therefore it was metal. Solid, not tubular. Therefore it was unfamiliar. Very little military equipment is curved.
    I walked over. Got close. Knelt down.
    It was a crowbar.
    A black-painted crowbar, all matted on one end with blood and hair.

    I stayed with it and sent Summer to get the truck. She must have jogged all the way back for it because she returned sooner than I expected and out of breath.
    “Do we have an evidence bag?” I asked.
    “It’s not evidence,” she said. “Training accidents don’t need evidence.”
    “I’m not planning on taking it to court,” I said. “I just don’t want to touch it, is all. Don’t want my prints on it. That might give Willard ideas.”
    She checked the back of the truck.
    “No evidence bags,” she said.
    I paused. Normally you take exquisite care not to contaminate evidence with foreign prints and hairs and fibers, so as not to confuse the investigation. If you screw up, you can get your ass chewed by the prosecutors. But this time the motivation had to be different, with Willard in the mix. If I screwed up, I could get my ass sent to jail. Means, motive, opportunity, my prints on the weapon. Too good to be true. If the training accident story came back to bite him, he would jump all over anything he could get.
    “We could bring a specialist out here,” Summer said. She was standing right behind me. I could sense her there.
    “Can’t involve anyone else,” I said. “I didn’t even want to involve you.”
    She came around beside me and crouched low. Smoothed stalks of grass out of the way with her hands, for a closer look.
    “Don’t touch it,” I said.
    “Wasn’t planning to,” she said.
    We looked at it together, close up. It was a handheld wrecking bar forged from octagonal-section steel. It looked like a high-quality tool. It looked brand new. It was