him.
When Cavanaugh believed he had his voice under control, he told the company commander, “Push out a security perimeter.”
“Shall I start getting them down, sir? The bodies?”
Yes. Get them down. Get them down as fast as you can. And get those goddamned flies off them.
“No,” Cavanaugh said. “This has to be documented. Find out if any of your men packed their cameras. Start taking pictures. As many as you can.” He turned to go back to his vehicle and make his report. Hoping he could keep his voice steady. “And keep everybody off the net. No comms beyond this company. Tell the cannon-cockers and the medics what I said. And wipe your face. It’s all right, Jake. But it doesn’t help for the troops to see you like that.”
“Yes, sir. Got it.”
As Cavanaugh walked back toward his track, he saw an infantryman break loose and stride toward a beggar huddled into a ball on the far side of the road, the only sign of local life in evidence. The pathetic creature in Arab rags hadn’t said a word, hadn’t looked up.
Rocking himself faintly and trembling, the beggar looked to be just about the filthiest human being Cavanaugh had ever seen.
The soldier raised his weapon as he walked. Cavanaugh saw a thumb click off the safety.
“Freeze, soldier,” Cavanaugh said. “You pull that trigger and I’ll drop you myself.” He found himself holding his pistol out at arm’s length.
The soldier stopped. And looked at Cavanaugh. In disgust. His expression warned that he just might shoot anyway.
Cavanaugh understood. But he couldn’t tell them that. He would’ve been glad to go back to the track, get his own carbine, and empty a magazine into the beggar himself.
Just for the satisfaction of hurting something, anything, from
But he wasn’t going to do it. And the soldier wasn’t going to do it.
Cavanaugh remembered the soldier’s name. DeSantis.
“PFC DeSantis. Lower that weapon. Put it on safe.”
Addressed by his rank and name, the soldier obeyed. But he continued to stare at the battalion commander. As if he hated him as much as he now hated the Jihadis. And every Arab.
The soldier’s squad leader walked up, spoke to DeSantis, and shooed him away. Cavanaugh sensed that the NCO had let the scene play out before he intervened.
It was going to be hard to keep them under control. Maybe impossible.
Even with his back turned to the field of crosses, Cavanaugh saw them. And the goddamned flies on their faces.
No. It wouldn’t be impossible to control the troops. Because he wasn’t going to let it be impossible. That was why he drew his 0–5 pay.
Cavanaugh walked over to the beggar hunched on the curb. Up close, the man looked badly beaten, damaged. Infirm.
The Arab stank. He was bloody. And he reeked of urine.
Then Pat Cavanaugh noticed what looked like a compact transmitter by the man’s side. The device looked like military hardware.
Cavanaugh nudged the beggar with the barrel of his pistol. Unwilling to touch cloth or flesh.
TWELVE
She tried to ignore the protesters. At a glimpse of her windshield decal, the gate guards waved her on the post, and she left the shouts and hoisted signs behind. But their words — and their underlying message — gripped her.
Sarah Colmer-Harris drove straight to Quarters One, wiping the wet from her eyes with an index finger. The trip into Killeen had been a mistake. On her arrival at the garage that had serviced her car since her husband took command, a supervisor denied that she’d made an appointment. When she asked to make one, she was told there wouldn’t be an opening for months.
Good Christians all, she thought bitterly. Feeling her personal disgust with religion vindicated. It had been one of the few issues on which she and her husband had always disagreed: He still prayed like a child, on his knees. And so many passages in his take-along Bible had been underlined — with a ruler, another child’s habit — that it looked like a text belonging to the most conscientious grad student in history.
She snorted as she parked. The noise was animal. If the “Christians” protesting saw that Bible, she decided, they’d probably attack him for defacing a sacred book.
No. They wouldn’t. Their masters would. A trial lawyer, once successful, she had sufficient acuity left to realize that those perfectly lettered signs outside the gates had been made well in advance.
Why couldn’t Gary see it? Why wouldn’t he see any of it? Why was he so blind?
Yes, blind. The thought of the man she loved with all her heart made her so angry that she wanted to lash out at him. Going blind? He’d been blind for years. With his naive faith that his country was indestructible and that his beloved Army would always remain the institution it once had been.
She knew that, technically speaking, her husband was a killer. He’d killed men in close combat, although he never spoke of it. The citations did. And his friends. His ever-fewer friends. But he was a gentle man at heart. And a gentleman. Blind, willfully blind, to what was going on.
The other blindness, the loss of vision he so dreaded, wouldn’t be so bad, she didn’t think. He’d make the best of that, too. He’d probably be the first blind Olympic marksman. But his blindness to evil, to the evil that had been growing up around him, was unforgivable.
“The Army will always be there,” he’d told her. “After all the rest of them have come and gone.”
Would it?
And did it matter, anyway? What good was his cherished Army without the law? When “God’s law,” as interpreted by a Bible-thumping huckster from the Ozarks, superseded the Constitution? Wasn’t that what they’d always accused those Muslim terrorists of doing? Setting themselves up as the voice of God and the arbiter of His laws?
You’re thinking like a lawyer, she told herself. And Gary thinks like a soldier. We’re both fools. There’s no place for either of us anymore.
Why couldn’t Gary see it?
The closest he had come to despair had been on the day the new Congress passed a law removing women from the armed forces. Shaking his head, he’d told her, “We’re becoming our enemies.” But even then, he shrugged it off moments later and repeated, “Well, the Army will always be here. We’ve been through worse.”
She had to watch her tongue with the other wives. More than a few were hedging their bets nowadays. And there were always spies. She wanted to lash out, to demand of them all, “What’s Christian about what’s happening? Where does it say in the Gospels, ‘Kill thy neighbor’?” But enough of her upbringing lingered, of the parochial-school lessons and the catechism, to let her see that Gary’s tormentors had nothing to do with Christ — that silly man who believed that the wealthy would share with the poor and that the poor would manifest virtue. Vice President Gui and all his self-righteous hangers-on were about as Christian as al-Mahdi. If not less so. They were creatures of the Book of Revelation, of spectacular stunts of hatred, every one of them afraid of the Whore of Babylon next door, presumably got up as a cheerleader. Christ would’ve puked.
Oh, what did she know? Maybe they were right, after all. Perhaps God did exist, and His par tic u lar genius was revenge. Was she paying, now, for the one error she regretted in her adult life? A brief affair she had lulled
