“I suppose I have a lawyer. My father would be able to call him, I suppose.”
“I hope you’ll cooperate with us, Ms. Wilder. Time is very important, and your cooperation would help you enormously later.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” she said.
“Ms. Wilder, we don’t have a lot of time. Time is of the essence.”
Original line, she thought. Where do they get these guys? You’d think they’d at least go to the trouble to find someone that she could relate to. But then she understood that in the whole apparatus there was nobody she could relate to; by the very act of joining the apparatus, such a man would forever lose purchase on the possibility of relating to her.
“Here’s the deal. You let me work for a little while longer. Turn on your little tape machines or whatever. You let me work, and as I work I’ll answer any question you want. Is that fair?”
“I take it you understand you’re in grave trouble.”
“I guess I always have been,” she said.
She was a beautiful woman, with a high, aristocratic face, a strong nose, and piercingly intelligent eyes. She had a supple body under jeans and a paint-spattered smock. She wore black high-topped Reeboks and round, owlish glasses. Her hair, black and lustrous, was drawn back tightly into a surprisingly girlish ponytail.
“We have information that suggests—”
“Let me just start where you want to end up. Won’t that save some time?”
“Yes,” the older man said.
She took a deep breath.
“Well, I did it. Yes. Whatever he says I did, I did it.”
“You gave foreign agents certain materials which—”
She laughed, involuntarily. “Foreign agents” sounded so forties.
“Materials?” she said. “I gave them
They just looked at her.
“I had a little camera. Called a Minox, very cute. Later, sometimes, I’d just haul the stuff to the library and make Xerox copies of it. He made it so easy. He was so sloppy. The stuff was everywhere, he just left it lying around. He must have been in love with me or something.”
Then she looked at them hard.
“But the joke’s on him. And you. I gave it to a guy who’s on our side. He’s just another Jew. He’s an Israeli. The Israelis are our side. So you can do to me what you did to Jonathan Pollard, and it doesn’t matter. Throw me in prison and send the key to the dead-letter bin, What do you think of that?”
“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” said the oldest of the men.
“Do you have ten hours and a bottle of very cold white wine?”
“We have ten minutes and a thermos of very hot coffee.”
“Then I guess I’d better hurry,” she said, and began to explain.
The shattered unit collapsed in the snow reminded Dick Puller of his own A-detachment after the fight at Anh Tran in July of ‘65. When the 82d had finally fought its way through, the survivors of the thirty-eight-day siege by the NVA in division strength just watched them come, numb and flat. He knew the feeling: the sense that your bones have melted, the way your brain fills with white fog and your joints are stiff and slow; and another thing, too, like persistent background music that will not go away — the terrible guilt you feel at the whimsy of the battle and all the good people who’ve died in spaces you’ve just moved out of or are about to
Bravo, having straggled down the mountain, had made a stab at reforming just at its base, where the forest met the meadow and where the road began its switchbacks up to the summit. Dick rode in with the first medevac chopper and with several of the Delta officers to debrief the survivors.
Now he walked among them. The boys sat singly in the snow, having found one another and then collapsed in a loose circle, their olive drab uniforms dark blots against the blinding whiteness that surrounded them. Many were wounded though many were not. Some had weapons, some did not. Some cried. Some laughed hysterically; some merely stared at Dick with furious, dark hostility. Some chattered helplessly with the cold, their lips blue, their faces drawn and slack. They looked exhausted or sick. Their young faces had the shock of nihilism. Their gear was all fouled up, their pouches open, their straps tangled, their boots unbloused. Not many had helmets.
He knelt by a boy, one of the few who still had his weapon. He didn’t have his helmet, but he had his weapon.
“Pretty tough up there, Specialist?”
The boy’s eyes swung to him at an idiot’s cadence. The boy just looked at him like a jerk. What, twenty-two? In ’Nam they were younger, even, in their teens. Dick, then a captain, had even had a seventeen-year-old; the gooks had caught him coming in off an ambush patrol and he’d died screaming in his own guts out beyond the wire.
“Son, I’m talking to you,” Dick said in a stronger voice.
“Huh? Oh, sorry, uh, sir.”
“They hit you pretty bad?”
“They had us cold. Just cut us up.”
“Did you do much damage?”
“Sir?”
“I said, did you hurt them?”
The question had no meaning.
Dick seized the M-16 from the boy’s limp hands, brought it to his nose, pulled the charging handle under the sight assembly. The ejector port snapped open; Dick sniffed the breech. It smelled of clean oil but not powder. He could see an immaculate cartridge sitting in the chamber.
“You didn’t see any targets?”
The boy looked at him, ashamed.
“I–I was too scared to think about that,” he said.
“I see,” said Dick. “Well, you’ve got a few hours to pull yourself together. Then tonight you go back. Tonight we all go back.”
The boy looked at him.
“I don’t want to go back,” he said baldly.
“Neither do I,” said Dick, “but I don’t see anyone else here, do you?”
“No, sir.”
Dick stood, winked at the kid, earning a little smile.
“I’ll try to do better tonight, sir,” the kid said.
“You don’t have to do better, you just have to be there.”
He could see the other Delta officers moving through the collection of dazed men while the Delta medics worked to patch the walking wounded.
Finally, Skazy came over to him.
“It’s not good,” he said.
“Anybody get close enough to get a peep under the canvas?”
“Nobody got within a hundred yards of their position.”
“So who are we fighting, Major? What’s your reading?”
“Whoever he is, he’s very good. He read the terrain, so he knew exactly the point of attack. He put his automatics in the center of the line and he must have linked belts. The volume of fire was terrific. The kids seem to agree there were two heavy guns hosing them down, plus lots of small arms. Lots of fire, so ammo must not be a problem. But that guy up there, he’s been in a fight or two in his time. He knows his business. I’ll bet we find he’s Forces. I mean, this is straight ’Nam, your basic A-team scenario, defending a tight hilltop perimeter against
