had nowhere to go.
He longed for the con ve niences of his youth, the easy communications, even the scrutiny of the media. Where were the cameras now? His nation’s enemies, when they shot down every satellite they could and corrupted the rest, had only assured that their deaths would go unrecorded. They had robbed his kind of the ability to talk freely across oceans but had failed to understand the resilience and ingenuity the West applied to warfare when it sensed its back was against the wall.
When the people of Nazareth died, their epitaph would be written by their killers.
How would Sim have it done? By death squads?
Harris felt a childish impulse to step up to the nearest figure in line and tell him or her, “
As Harris approached the head of the line, he saw that only the bottom layer of the pallet remained. And the sweat-drenched soldiers on distribution duty were breaking into that. Behind them, Pat Cavanaugh stood erect in his body armor. As if attempting to inspire a confidence he didn’t feel himself.
Yet, as Harris edged up to him, the younger man grinned. “Pardon me for saying so, sir,” he told the general, “but this is one assignment I’m not going to thank you for.”
The attempt at banter fell flat. Cavanaugh’s smile was one of despair.
“We just have to focus on the immediate problem,” Harris told him. “Do what’s doable. Right now, we need to do everything we can to prevent any further outbreaks of violence, anything that certain senior officers might be able to describe as ‘an armed rebellion’.”
Cavanaugh nodded. He was about to say something when his battalion command sergeant major marched up.
“Sir?” he said to Cavanaugh. “Division wants you. On the land line.”
Cavanaugh glanced at Harris. The general nodded: Go see what they have to say.
The sergeant major didn’t leave with his commander. Tired and mentally sluggish, Harris had to eye the man’s uniform to remind himself of his name.
“Fun, travel, and adventure. Right, Sergeant Major Bratty?”
“All I can stand, sir.” He looked at the general, sizing him up, man to man. Then he added, “Don’t this suck shit, though?”
“That’s a pretty good summation.”
Bratty drew off his helmet, wiped his forehead and scalp with a rag drawn from his battle-rattle, patted the excess sweat from the helmet’s interior padding, then set it back down on his skull and snapped the chin-strap together again. He didn’t have to fuss with the headgear to resettle it: He had the drill sergeant’s gift of getting it right the first time.
Harris noticed, again, that the NCO had a bandaged hand. But he sensed that asking about it would be the wrong kind of small talk with the man standing next to him.
“I expect you’ll be getting an order to withdraw from the city,” Harris said instead.
Bratty shrugged. It was the old, standard-issue NCO shrug that attempted to deflect any suspicion of emotion. But it didn’t work this time.
“Yesterday, I would’ve been ready to go, sir. To tell you the truth, I’d just about had it. But just look at these poor buggers. A man hates to just walk away…”
“Yes,” Harris said. “A man does.”
“Well, I’m going to make the rounds, sir. Got some Marines up in those buildings across the square, watching the crowd. Don’t want ’em to feel the Army’s neglecting them.”
“Mind if I accompany you, Sergeant Major?”
“You’re the corps commander, sir.”
Harris began to tell the man, “No, I’m not. Not anymore.” But there was no point. There’d be too much else to say. He’d made the situation clear to Pat Cavanaugh, but the battalion commander had either forgotten to tell his sergeant major or just hadn’t had the opportunity. Or, Harris realized, had chosen not to tell him. Or anyone. Yet.
He was sorry that he’d gotten Cavanaugh into this. But somebody had needed to do it. And Cavanaugh had been a logical choice. You didn’t become a soldier just for the good missions.
“After you, Sergeant Major. I’ll try not to get underfoot.”
And they walked up the line, the endless line, of faces. A young woman with an infant, sensing that the water would run out before her turn, glittered with tears.
At the sight of Harris and the sergeant major, a fat man waved his arms, complaining noisily in Arabic. His neighbors in the line had been cowed, though. Instead of adding their voices to back him up, they shied away.
The fat man shouted after Harris’s back. The words were incomprehensible, but his meaning was clear: How can you do this to us?
Harris stiffened his posture as he walked away. As if on a parade ground for a change of command.
When the general was halfway through the crowd, a young man with a beatific expression stepped from the line and rushed up to embrace him.
Sergeant Ricky Garcia slept four hours, deep and hard. He dreamed of his mother. She was alive and healthy and smiling like always in the old days, so full of love the supply never ran out. Garcia was a grown man in the dream, but still a boy, too, and the sun shone on a perfect L.A. day, on a city just the way it was when he was a kid, long before the bombs, when a trip across town to the beach at Santa Monica had been a journey to the other side of the world, and his old man, who hadn’t left yet, had to lay out so much cash to park they couldn’t afford to eat. But that wasn’t in the dream. The dream was just all good, only a little disconnected. The kitchen was at the front of the house, where the room with the TV should’ve been. He tried to explain, but his mother didn’t care. She just hugged him. And hugged him.
When he awoke, kicked in the sole of his boot by Lieutenant Niedrig, who was the acting company commander now and babbling about nukes, Garcia felt as if something had been stolen from him — something that he would never be able to get back. It was as if his mother had been right there, alive, happy. Just fat enough for her kids to tease her. And now she was dead again, and the way he had to remember her was lying in a crummy bed in one of those old motels they turned into what they called hospices for all those sick with radiation. And her so thin and frail he was afraid to touch her and hurt her.
After the lieutenant moved on to bother somebody else, Garcia shuffled off to take a dump. But really to be alone for a few minutes. To get a grip. To remember. To stop remembering.
After that, the day wasn’t so bad. They weren’t ordered back to the burial detail. Instead, they were trucked down to the center of town — which was crummier than Rampart on Sunday morning — and the lieutenant told Garcia to distribute his platoon around the back of the plaza, to get up on the second or third deck of the buildings and keep an eye on the fiesta. Not that the rags were celebrating. At first, it was all men sitting down there, miserable as gangbangers caught in another gang’s hood. Garcia was down to two light squads, and he put Corporal Gallotti across the street above a couple of busted-out shops, while he put his own squad in buildings that faced north so the sun would never be in their eyes.
The day before had been ugly, with the company losing six men, including the captain. A bunch more had been sent to the rear, badly injured. The platoon’s mood toward the locals had been ugly enough after that village girl did her thing with the grenades, but the crazy-ass bust-up with the demonstrators and snipers by the mass grave had pushed everybody to the edge. Maybe beyond it. His Marines regarded all the rags as the enemy now, and Garcia had to fight the feeling himself. Especially when he thought of Cropsey jumping on that grenade. He still couldn’t fit all the pieces of that together, and to keep himself under control he came down all the harder on any why-don’t-we-just-whack-’em-and-leave bullshit.
He prayed that the day would be quiet. They needed time to get themselves back together.
As always, he prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a last connection to his mother. But the Virgin was giving him a bad time. The tattoo on his forearm itched like crazy. By noon, when the water drop came around and the rags all popped out of the woodwork, with Army Rangers forcing them to line up and behave, Garcia had scratched
