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The other building had been a cow barn. A few of the stanchions were still there in a row down the left side. The walls were stone, laid up without concrete, the floor, a couple of feet below ground level, mostly dirt with a cracked concrete apron at the front end. Three bodies were laid out on the concrete now, all civilians. There seemed to be far too much blood for only three men, but three was all he could see. There was an under-smell of old cow, on top of that fresh blood, and then shit.
“They tried to shoot it out. One was awake somehow; one of our guys took a hit, he’s not bad. We took out two people. Not in very good shape.” The soldier looked sideways at him. “Really messed up.”
“Torture?”
The soldier nodded. Alan walked down the room, smelled vomit. He already felt sick, was still hyperventilating. There was old blood on the walls down here, probably a lot more soaked into the dirt floor. The stanchions had been used as human restraints, with handcuffs locked to them high and low. At the end of the room was a single chair by itself, almost centered. It looked like a set for a minimalist play. Against the wall was a big washtub, half full of reddened water, a lot of water splashed out on the floor. Ropes and a steel bar, once some sort of tool, hung from the ceiling beam.
“The airplane,” he said. A form of torture.
“They’d cut the eyelids off one guy, then shot him. The doctor doesn’t think he’ll make it.”
Alan got out the point-and-shoot camera and pointed and shot. He felt he was going to throw up. Partly it was almost getting killed, partly it was what he was doing, seeing. And the pain in his side. His hands were shaking so hard he had trouble pointing the camera.
“Tenente! Time to go!”
He ran back to the house and took three photos of the interior. Maybe the newsman could do something with them. He didn’t go back upstairs.
Something boomed. He doused his flashlight and started out the front door. The sergeant grabbed his arm, pulled him down. “Police armored car. They’re coming up the street.”
Alan looked around. It was almost light. There was the sergeant, three soldiers. Him. Flames turned the snow pink, the torture barn on fire.
“Everybody else out?”
The sergeant nodded.
“Go?”
The sergeant pointed, got up. They ran for the gate. One man stayed behind, threw something in the door—thud— and the place went up in flames.
A big double boom sounded from the street, probably both shooters at once; flame snicked up through the tree branches like a tongue, then seemed to expand at the bottom, beyond the wall. He was aware of more general firing, faraway pop-pops and louder, more deliberate noise nearby. At the gate, the sergeant thrust out an arm like a traffic cop and held him back, looked, then grabbed him and pushed him in the direction of the choppers. Alan resented it, resented the rough handling and the implication that he didn’t belong there, but he knew the sergeant was right. Anyway, bullets were whiffling near him. He got down. Captain Gagliano and half his Romulus team were trading fire with somebody down the street—quite a way down the street, well beyond the burning armored car. The other way, the rest of Romulus waited to cover the withdrawal. On the other side of the street, several bodies lay in the snow. Serb militia, from the town. One man was in striped pajamas. The sergeant waved an impatient hand at him and Alan began to run. The waiting soldiers got bigger, bigger, and then they, too, were passing him backward through their line, as if he was not quite their main concern just then and they just wanted to make sure he was out of the line of fire …
He hunched his shoulders and ran for the helos.
The temperature in the big tent must have been close to eighty Fahrenheit despite the cold outside. It wasn’t the big propane heater but the press of bodies. Italians, Ukrainians, Kenyans, one American—even a couple of Dutch artillerists who had wandered down, although they hadn’t had provocation enough to fire a shot. It was as noisy as a locker room after a winning game, and just about as smelly, although the over-riding smell was red wine, with some Kenyan cane splashed around the edges.
Feeling no pain, Alan thought. He certainly knew what that meant now. The surgeon had given him two capsules, would have given him four or maybe eight if he’d asked, and on top of that there was the wine. It wasn’t what used to be called Dago Red, either, but Gattinara from a year long enough ago that the stuff didn’t show up in shops any more. Courtesy of Captain Gagliano’s colonel, who was shocked, shocked! to hear of what had happened (you had to be reminded of Claude Rains in Casablanca) but was so delighted he’d released a couple of cases from his own store. Flown in specially as soon as the message flashed that they were out with only three hit, no dead, and two helos full of goodies.
“Well, not exactly goodies,” Alan was explaining slowly to Doctor wa Danio. He spoke with the exaggerated care of a man who has had too much wine, just enough painkiller, and not enough sleep. “We seem to have brought out two oversize sacks of Serb garbage.” He leaned closer. “I am not speaking met-a-phor-i-cally. I mean actual garbage. Rinds and things.” Along with some more useful stuff like names and addresses and computer disks.
Two Ukrainians were doing some sort of dance to music that sounded to Alan like Afro-pop, but he suspected that everything sounded like Afro-pop to him just then. He smiled at the Ukrainians. When he turned back to the Kenyan doctor to tell him how much the Ukrainians amused him, the doctor had been replaced by Captain Gagliano. Gagliano had a glass in one hand and Alan’s neck in the other. “Did we biff them?” he said.
“We biffed them.”
“We biffed them!” Gagliano nodded. “I hear you were hit.”
“In the ribs.”
“Nothing.”
“They are my ribs.”
“Ribs are nothing. I have one man shot in the neck. The neck is something. One in the arm. He may lose the arm. But your rib does not impress me.” He kissed Alan’s cheek. “What impresses me is you got us in and out and we biffed them.” He leaned his head back and tried to focus. “You want an Italian medal?”
“You can’t have too many medals.”
The captain nodded. “Or too much wine. You want some wine?”
“I think—”
Then he was sitting on the floor and somebody was smiling at him, God knows why. He tried to get up, thought better of it, and sat there, grinning at the noise and the heat and the uproar. The combination allowed him to remember that he had killed a man, this time without feeling sick about it. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Bubbles of blood.
“Lieutenant?”
He looked up. Way up. A very tall, emaciated man in civilian clothes. The man folded himself into pieces and brought his head down to Alan’s level and said, “You look for me, they say.” He had a bony, almost skull-like face, and skin cratered by illness or acne long ago. “I am Marco. Translator?”
“Ah.” Right. That made sense. But why? Aha. Translator, yes. Alan held up a finger. “Momento,” he said, forgetting that Italian was not the language in question. Where had he put it? He patted himself, finally found it in the buttoned breast pocket of the Italian shirt he was wearing. Took it out with great care and unfolded it, presenting it to Marco so that the slightly frivolous backside, showing incomplete but naked female parts, was hidden. It was the picture of the man in camos he’d taken from the bedroom in the house. “What’s that say?” he asked. At least that was what he hoped he asked.
Marco squinted. “Says, ‘Colonel Zulu at the Battle of the Crows.’”
“What’s that mean? ‘Battle of the Crows’?”
Marco scratched his ruined chin. “Aaah. Well. It’s the Serbs, you see? The Battle of the Crows—hmm. Well.” He sighed. “It happened six centuries ago, okay?”
That was not okay at all. That made no sense. What was this guy, drunk or something?
Detroit.
Radko Panic dropped his heavy coat on the floor, not even thinking, knowing she would hang it up later, if she knew what was good for her, and glanced out of habit at the crappy little table where she put the mail. Bills, junk, ripoffs, he expected, the same as always, but there was a package and his heart jumped. Even the fact that it was different was enough, but there was the color of it, too, and the feel of the paper under his fingers and the string that held it together. The old days. That rough brown paper, that hairy string—relics, he knew now, of a technology he had left behind when he had left the old places. The postmark was French, but he knew it did not come from France.
She had left his meal for him and he shoved it into the microwave and pushed buttons without thinking, his face split by a big grin. Rare, that grin. Really rare. He saw himself in the microwave window. He’d had a couple on the way home at the Rouge Tap; the grin, pasted on the microwave as if it belonged to the machine and not to him, was happy. Well, why not? A man deserved to be happy.
He took one of her knives and cut the string. He had surprisingly delicate hands for a big man, but he was a precision toolmaker, did things well, deftly, when he was sober. He slit the tape-shiny ends and slid out the box inside, made of a thin cardboard of the kind that used to come inside shirts. It too was held with tape, and he cut that and put her knife aside, thinking without thinking that the knife was getting dull and what the hell had she been doing with it, sharpening pencils again?
Inside was a photograph and something else. He slid the photo out. He left the something else, like the prize in a Crackerjack box. There had still been Crackerjack boxes when he had first come to America. He had loved them.
The photo, grainy and a little washed-out, showed a man in camo fatigues, one hand raised over his head, an automatic rifle in the raised hand. It was too fuzzy to see what kind of rifle it was. At the man’s feet was something dark, a bundle, a pile, a—what?
He turned the photo over. Big, black letters said, “YOUR BOY AT THE BATTLE OF THE CROWS!!!!”
She came in behind him then; he heard her, didn’t even turn, didn’t speak. He grinned at the back of the photo. He had heard the expression “bursting with pride,” knew now what it meant. He thought he was going to explode with it.
The microwave dinged and she said something and he grunted at her, and she got the food out and began to arrange it at the place she had already set for him. Her hair in some kind of thing, an old bathrobe clutched around her, her face gray, soft, lined, purple shadows under the eyes.
“Is it—from—?” She had had a sweet voice as a young woman; now it was wispy. She was afraid of him. With good reason.
He thrust the photo at her. He sat down and picked up the fork and filled his mouth. Seeing her standing close by, he waved her away and she went over to the sink and held the photo up under the light.
He thrust another forkful into his mouth and then put a long finger down into the narrow box and took out the small thing that was in there. It made him grin again. It was a human eyelid.
2
February – April
The succession of naval fleets that guard the Mediterranean is like the turning of a great wheel. Always, at the top, is the fleet in place—one nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, most potent of the weapons in the world, on which the commanding admiral flies his flag; two guided-missile cruisers; destroyers and frigates and submarines; and, around and behind them, support and repair and fueling ships. These ships are six months on station—six months at the top of the wheel—with tenuous lines of communication to the land, to be sure, but alone at sea as ships have always been alone at sea. Then the wheel turns, and the battle group on station turns its bows and heads for the Pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar, and at the same time the fleet that has been forming and training on the east coast of the United States puts to sea and begins its voyage to the top of the wheel. The wheel turns, and the new fleet takes its place on station, and the old fleet goes into port at Norfolk, while another fleet trains and forms and readies itself to sail in six months more. And behind it, at the bottom of the wheel, another fleet exists as an idea and a skeletal organization; it will not sail for a year, but already its flag-rank commander is in place with his most important senior officers; the air squadrons that will deploy with the carriers are designated; ships and ships’ companies know where they will be. And even as the wheel turns, other fleets exist, phantom or hypothetical fleets, ideas of fleets that will come into being in eighteen months or two years or five or ten. Other crisis areas, or areas of strategic interest, have their own wheels—Korea, for instance, or the Persian Gulf. Sometimes one area has several wheels.
The wheel turns, and forward into time the fleets move toward their place on the wheel and the six-month period for which they exist: the presence of a battle group in the Mediterranean Sea. It is a figure of life—of coming into being and of going; of being born, and of dying; of existing only as an idea of the future and as a memory of the past.
The battle groups come and go. It is the wheel that is important.
Vice-Admiral Richard Pilchard commanded Battle Group Four. Battle Group Four served off Bosnia, drilled holes in the Adriatic, had liberty in Trieste and Naples. They won no glory, but they held the line, and their aircraft sent a message. Now Battle Group Four is split back into its component ships, in Norfolk, Charleston, Mayport, and Newport.
Vice-Admiral Nathan Green commands Battle Group Five, now on station off Bosnia; it changed its name when it arrived on station and became Task Force 155. It has a NATO name, too, but most people will keep calling it Battle Group Five, or BG 5.
Vice-Admiral Richard Toricelli commands Battle Group Six, now training in the Norfolk area. Vice-Admiral Rudolph Newman will command Battle Group Seven and is organizing his staff. Vice-Admiral Harold Rehnquist will command Battle Group Eight but has only just received those orders and will not sail for almost eighteen months.
Alan Craik is the Assistant Carrier Air Wing Intelligence Officer for BG 5, which is at the top of the wheel. On station. If not facing the animal, then at least very sensitive to its presence.
LCDR “Rafe” Rafehausen, now finishing a stint at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, will soon report to VS-49 as its executive officer. LTjg Christine Nixon has already reported aboard VS-49 at Cecil Field, Florida, after her first, abbreviated tour working counternarcotics in Key West, Florida, to become its intelligence officer. Seaman Apprentice Henry Sneesen, Aviation Electronics striker, has joined VS-49 direct from his A school and boot camp in Orlando, Florida. VS-49 itself has existed as an entity with airplanes and men and women to repair them, maintain them, fly them, and fight them for only two months, but 49’s place on the wheel has existed for over a year. VS-49 is going to sea as the airborne antisubmarine squadron of an air wing assigned to USS Andrew Jackson in Battle Group Seven, commanded by Admiral Newman. And, like every battle group that the US Navy sends to sea, this one will endure wind and waves, merciless weather, stress, and danger, and not all of its members will return. But, unlike most, Battle Group Seven will have to fight.
Fort Reno, North Carolina.
Harry O’Neill was mad, and he had to piss so bad he could feel his bladder throbbing. He was doing a goddam stupid surveillance exercise, and he was still angry about last night’s exercise, and he wasn’t doing things very well. He hadn’t checked this part of the route for johns when he did the prep, only telephones. Would it be a screwup if he stopped to piss? And what would he do if one of the instructors came into the john with him—maybe spoke to him, even challenged him?
“Shit,” O’Neill muttered. He didn’t say it with any force. Last night still enraged him. He and a student partner had done a mock recruiting exercise, taking two instructors to dinner and pretending to make the first steps toward recruiting, pretending to have a cover and having to use the fake name and the fake ID and the fake profession. And what had been the instructor’s summary of what O’Neill had done? What had the black instructor said about the black student?
“Not credible,” he had said. Why? “Has to learn to dress.” O’Neill felt outraged. He’d worn the clothes he’d been wearing for years! What was it—the Burberry blazer? the Willis and Geiger shirt? the Church shoes? What the fuck did he mean?
Then he had got to the last line of the evaluation and understood—a lot.
“I don’t believe this put-on taste and ‘class’ in a black man.”
Harry O’Neill had seen where his real problem lay.
So he had tried to take out his anger by writing a letter to Alan Craik. He could let Craik, alone among his white friends, see his bitterness. “I been dissed by what I’m sure this bastard would call ‘one of my own people’!” he wrote. “I ain’t NEEGGAH enuf fo him. This NEEGGAH is 2 stylish 4 him! Jesus Christ, Al, haven’t these fuckheads ever seen a gentleman before?”
So now he was driving carefully down a road in Virginia, seething with rage and trying to do well in a surveillance exercise while keeping his bladder from exploding all over the rental car.
He wanted a john so bad he squirmed. He drummed on the steering wheel with his right hand and then jabbed the radio to turn off some sixties soft-rock crap and then jabbed it back on because the silence somehow made his bladder worse. He glanced into the left-side mirror and saw them still back there, the green Camaro with the two guys, nicely on his butt but hanging back. Where was the other one? And which was the other one—the red Saturn he’d seen twice with the dark-haired woman? Or the dark Cherokee with the older guy in the hat? “Shit,” he muttered again.
Ahead was the two-lane road down to the ferry. There would be a line for the ferry, but it went every fifteen minutes, and he could get into line and then hit the head at the ticket office and get relief. Yes! Except that his plan was to take the left before the ferry and force the guys following him to declare themselves, both cars, and then when they had done that he could go one-point-three miles to the little hill with the sharp left on the far side, take the left and get out of sight before they came over the hill so that at least one would go straight. If he was lucky. (Luck is not a planning factor, the instructor had said, but it is useful.) No, they would go straight, because the road turned again and then twisted like a snake for a mile, so they’d think he was up ahead. (That was his alternative, to speed up and stay on the road and use the twists to get out of sight. He might do that. In fact, that had been his original plan. But, goddamit, there wasn’t a phone with a john up there for six-point-two miles, and if he took the left there was one in point-seven!)
He swung left away from the ferry, trying not to feel his bladder as the road got rough, going deliberately slow so they wouldn’t lose him, drawing them along. They must be made to think that losing him was their fault, not his. Then he would make his phone call and leave the message and be out of it.
Phone call first, he told himself. He groaned. He knew that the phone call had to be first. Even if his bladder burst. Duty calls. Ha-ha. Call of nature. Right.
The Camaro was right back there where it should be, and then well behind it he could see another vehicle, dark-colored. Must be the Cherokee. Okay. Well, that was good, at least he knew who they were now.
He was chewing his tongue, a habit he’d got into since he got in this business. He’d never had nerves before. Now he chewed it almost viciously. The little hill was coming up, then the quick left. If the Camaro speeded up—! But it didn’t. It was okay. Distance was good, speed was good—
O’Neill went up the hill exactly right, wanting to gun it but keeping it just the same speed, not giving anything away (Nice job, O’Neill; thank you, sir, but I’d rather be pissing) and then, just over the crest, accelerated and hit the brake a tap as he jerked it left, a quick skid turn, and he was into the side road and swinging back right and out of sight, and he’d done it.
He’d done it! Nobody had followed him!
“Bladder, stick with me now!” he murmured, and he ripped the last seven-tenths to the convenience store he’d spotted three days before. There were two pump islands and a small parking area, and at the side a telephone he’d checked, and it had been working last time he came by. Please, God. He had the phonecard ready. He winced as he got out of the car and his bladder shifted, and he was sure he was walking bent over as he headed for the phone. God, if there was somebody there ahead of him, he’d crack! Some teenager, giggling and—
Nobody.
He was aware of movement behind. He swung his head, alert for one of the pursuers. No, an old guy in a blue Jimmy. Still, he waited, throbbing. Always be suspicious. The old guy got down. Flexed his knee. Bad leg. Come on! The old guy was wearing a tractor hat, which he now took off so he could rumple up his hair. He looked around. Stretched. Come on! Then he took out a lot of keys that were chained to his belt by something you could have docked the QE2 with, and he selected a key with the care of a Baby Boomer selecting a blush wine, and at last he jerked the hose out of its cradle and jammed it down into his tank and began to pump. Whistling.
That was okay, then. O’Neill tried not to think of the gas running into the tank, the sound of liquid.
O’Neill leaned into the phone’s transparent shelter and heard the dial tone. Inserted the phonecard. The call was to another area code; the numbers seemed to go on and on. Then the ringing. Two rings, hang up. Good. Wait. Don’t think about pissing. Listen for the dial tone. Card. Area code. Number. Ringing. One, two, three, four—picked up. No voice.
“Seventeen,” O’Neill said. “Yes.” Oh, thank God! End of exercise.
He hung up, ready to run for the men’s room—and the old guy from the pickup truck was standing there, about five feet from him. The old guy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a card and held it up. The card was black, otherwise blank, but O’Neill knew what it meant.
“Oh, shit.”
“You left skid marks back at the turn,” the old guy said. “C-minus.”
O’Neill sagged. “You going to wash me out of the program?”
“That’s not my decision. I’ll say you did pretty good up to the last part.”
O’Neill started to say something, and then his bladder really pulsed, and he said, “If I don’t get to pee, I’ll wet my pants.”
“Oh, we would flunk you out for that.” The old guy grinned. “Got to learn to carry a bottle, son.” And, as if to prove that he was a mean old sonofabitch, he made a sound: “Pssssssss—”
O’Neill ran.
That evening, he learned that he had made the second cut, despite the low grade on the surveillance exercise. Three others hadn’t—two young civilians who hadn’t a clue and shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and a marine captain whose flunkout was a real surprise. He seemed tough and smart to O’Neill, but he was out and Harry was still in. And Richmond had left on his own hook three days before. The class was shrinking.
Why him and not me? he wondered, thinking of the marine captain. I stay, he goes. Makes no sense. He found he wasn’t entirely pleased that he hadn’t been bounced. Relieved, yes. Ego-relieved. But deeper, no. He wasn’t sure he belonged here.
After the posting of the flunk list, they’d put up for the first time a list of after-graduation assignments. The better you did, the better your chances of getting a good one two months from now when it was over. He had identified two he wanted, and he knew he would have a lot going for him in both because of his near-native French and his experience in-country. Paris and Marseille. Wow. You bet. Then all the others, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia … Jesus, Yugoslavia! Surely nobody would send a black man to Yugoslavia!