The Enemy

signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimeter pistol at seven-thirty on the evening of January fourth. He had signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.
    “Why did he take it?” I said.
    “We don’t ask for a reason,” the clerk said. “We just do the paperwork.”

    We came out of the hangar and walked toward the accommodations block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers’ rides. Not many imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but mostly there were pickup trucks and big Detroit coupes, some of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tires. There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.
    We detoured to take a look at it.
    It was about ten years old. It looked immaculately clean, inside and out. It had been washed and waxed, thoroughly, within the last day or two. The wheel arches were clean. The tires were black and shiny. There was a coiled hose on the hangar wall, thirty feet away. We bent down and peered in through the windows. The interior looked like it had been soaked with detailing fluid and wiped and vacuumed. It was a two-seat car, but there was a parcel shelf. It was small, but probably big enough for a crowbar hidden under a coat. Summer knelt down and ran her fingers under the sills. Came up with clean hands.
    “No grit from the track,” she said. “No blood on the seats.”
    “No yogurt pot on the floor,” I said.
    “He cleaned up after himself.”
    We walked away. We went out through their main gate and locked Trifonov’s gun in the front of our Humvee. Then we turned around and headed back inside.

    I didn’t want to involve the adjutant. I just wanted to get Trifonov out of there before anyone knew what was going down. So we went in through the mess kitchen door and I found a steward and told him to find Trifonov and bring him out through the kitchen on some kind of a pretext. Then we stepped back into the cold and waited. The steward came out alone five minutes later and told us Trifonov wasn’t anywhere in the mess.
    So we headed for the cells. Found a soldier coming out of the showers and he told us where to look. We walked past Carbone’s empty room. It was quiet and undisturbed. Trifonov bunked three doors farther down. We got there. His door was standing open. The guy was right there in his room, sitting on the narrow cot, reading a book.
    I had no idea what to expect. As far as I knew Bulgaria had no Special Forces. Truly elite units were not common inside the Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia had a pretty good airborne brigade, and Poland had airborne and amphibious divisions. The Soviet Union itself had a few
Vysotniki
tough guys. Apart from that, sheer weight of numbers was the name of the game, in the eastern part of Europe. Throw enough bodies into the fray, and eventually you win, as long as you regard two-thirds of them as expendable. And they did.
    So who was this guy?
    NATO Special Forces put a lot of emphasis on endurance in selection and training. They have guys running fifty miles carrying everything including the kitchen sink. They keep them awake and hiking over appalling terrain for a week at a time. Therefore NATO elite troops tended to be small whippy guys, built like marathon runners. But this Bulgarian was huge. He was at least as big as me. Maybe even bigger. Maybe six-six, maybe two-fifty. He had a shaved head. He had a big square face that would be somewhere between brutally plain and reasonably good-looking depending on the light. At that point the fluorescent tube on the ceiling of his cell wasn’t doing him any favors. He looked tired. He had piercing eyes set deep and close together in hooded sockets. He was a few years older than me, somewhere in his early thirties. He had huge hands. He was wearing brand-new woodland BDUs, no name, no rank, no unit.
    “On your feet, soldier,” I said.
    He put his book down on the bed next to him, carefully, facedown and open, like he was saving his place.

    We put handcuffs on him and got him into the Humvee without any trouble. He was big, but he was quiet. He seemed resigned to his fate. Like he knew it had been only a matter of