I jogged alongside the little officer, whose head hung a millimeter. “Don’t let Ord bother you.”
She raised her head. Her eyes were prettier up close.
“He picks on soldiers he likes. He did it to me when I was in Basic.”
“And you are?” Her English was perfect but accented. I could watch her lips move all day.
“Wander. Jason. US Army. Specialist fourth class. Or I was. Now I’m just another GEF grunt.”
She nodded and extended her hand. “Munshara. Sharia. Egyptian Army. Formerly lieutenant, Specialist.” She raised her chin a notch.
“Yes, ma’am.” Erased rank or not, military courtesy was a hard habit to break.
Her duffel slipped from her shoulder. The canvas bag was as big as she was, and I reached to steady it. She jerked away and struggled not to puff in the thin, two-mile-high air.
How do you pick up another soldier, especially one who outranks you?
“I’m a machine gunner.”
“I also. Perhaps we will compete.”
Not exactly a date, but the door hung ajar for further contact.
She reached the truck and hefted her duffel in. I thought about offering her a hand up. Maybe a push on the fanny. She shot me a look, and I dropped the thought.
She had to hop twice to get herself up and into the truck. I looked away.
“Thank you for the American welcome, Jason.” She smiled down at me. I watched the truck lurch away as my heart fluttered.
“Nice.” Ari stood beside me. “But not my type.”
“Huh?”
“Israel and the Arabs made peace twenty years ago but Mom wouldn’t have been ready for me to bring home a nice Egyptian girl.” He blinked at the mention of his mother.
“Oh.”
Dallas had been an early hit and one of the worst. Every soldier in GEF had lived some variation of the same tragic story. Etiquette developed quickly. You never asked about anyone’s family, directly. Unless the other soldier brought it up, first “Lose anyone else?”
Ari nodded. “My father was a haberdasher. We had three stores. North Dallas has good rag trade. Had.”
He couldn’t ask, so I said, “My mother was in Indianapolis.”
The other part of the ritual was to change subjects once basic information was exchanged.
Jeeb fluttered down and perched, one wing brushing Ari’s curls. Four talons gripped Ari’s shoulder, two talons wiped antennae as they refracted into Jeeb’s anterior. Jeeb was a J-series, so he not only observed things, he hacked into any known database and cross-referenced anything he found.
Ari pointed at the shrinking truck. “Lieutenant Munchkin, there? Her father was a colonel in the Egyptian Air Force. She lost her parents and six sisters to the Cairo Projectile. She can shoot the eyes out of the jacks in a card deck at six hundred meters with an M-60. She’s single and straight. She wears thong underwear.”
“That’s some nosy bug you got mere, Ari.”
Ari adjusted his yarmulke . “His grandma was Jewish.”
Her truck turned and disappeared behind a row of parked Hercs. Jeeb had to be exaggerating. I was the best shot I knew with an M-60, and I couldn’t see a deck of cards at six hundred meters. But I hoped he was right about the thong.
The next morning everyone at Camp Hale but support staff assembled in a rock bowl at the foot of the peaks. In its center, the Combat Engineer Battalion had erected a stage and loudspeakers. Earmarked for personal security, I sat up front with HQ Battalion, below the stage, with frigid rock searing my butt through insulated trousers and frigid wind searing my bare nose.
Major General Nathan Cobb mounted the stage in the same fatigue parka the rest of us wore, but with two stars on each shoulder. Our commanding officer flipped back his hood. Better him than me.
Completely gray and rail-thin, he wore old-fashioned glasses. He pushed them back on a red nose and drew a paper from his pocket. Wind whipped it in his fingers.
He looked out over fifteen thousand faces. Ten thou-sand would form the division, the rest were alternates. What that said about expected training casualties knotted my stomach.
Nat Cobb adjusted his microphone. “Cold enough for you?” I’d read up on the man for whom I might take a bullet. He came from a small, plain town in Maine and talked like it.
“No, sir!” Fifteen thousand voices roared back.
“Maybe we can warm things up for the Slugs.”
Bigger roar. Nat Cobb wiped snot off his nose with his mitten and smiled at his soldiers. Most generals come with papers like a pedigreed poodle. West Point. Family history. Embassy and Washington liaison assignments.
Nat Cobb was a mutt He’d enlisted at eighteen, got a field promotion and fought his way into Officer Candidate School. Over the years, he’d earned a master’s in international relations and kicked ass at the Command and General Staff College. He spurned Pentagon career-builder assignments to stay close to troops in the field. They said he didn’t know which fork to use at White House dinners and didn’t care. Fortunately for Cobb’s career, the current occupant of that address didn’t care either, and she was the commander in chief.
He cleared his throat, and the vast audience fell silent. “I’m not going to bullshit you or motivate you. We’ve all had plenty of both lately. Each of us has the most important, hardest job ahead of us any human being has ever had. Most of us will die trying to do that job. All I can offer you is my promise that I will bring you home alive even if it costs my own life. But if I must choose saving you or saving home, my choice is clear. I know each of you will make the same choice.”
He paused. The wind died, and I heard breath in fifteen thousand throats.
“You’ve already listened to me beat gums too long. Let’s get to work.” He turned and stepped down, to dead silence.
I suppose we expected fist-pumping oratory or a detailed outline or something. General Patton telling us to make the other son of a bitch die for his country. General Marshall laying out the master plan.
Ari leaned toward me. “Gets to the point, doesn’t he?”
“Wait ‘til you meet his division sergeant major.”
The next weeks flew. The good news was we slept an honest six hours daily, had staff to pull KP and the like, and got almost-edible meals. Nat Cobb was a GIs general. It was usual to find him in a mess hall, at a table with privates, eating off a tray like a regular grunt. And woe betide the mess sergeant who burned the bacon at that meal.
The bad news was every minute that we didn’t spend on bullshit we spent humping up mountains or cleaning weapons. Basic was a vacation by comparison. And the cold hung around each of us morning and night like an icy rag.
Which brings me to temperature endurance testing and back to Munchkin.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Temperature endurance testing involved freezing your ass off. Every moment at Camp Hale involved freezing your ass off, but TET had it as a specific objective.
The brains had figured out early that humans would freeze to death on Ganymede without battery-heated fatigues. So they invented Smart Clothes. Very forties. A chip calculates your body’s need for heat against available battery power. You stay alive, if not comfortable.
If you’re wondering why battery depletion was an issue, remember that the Eternad system wasn’t perfected at first. In case you’ve been living in a cave the last few years, Eternad’s a system of flexible bands and levers built into clothing that stores body-motion energy in rechargeable batteries. Just like the alternators on internal- combustion cars recharged the battery by harnessing engine motion. Simply breathing keeps you juiced.
But at that time, the batteries were conventional. A GI with hardy metabolism could last a day under field conditions without a new battery. Another might popsicle inside twelve hours because his chip calculated he
