He slapped palms on his thighs and stood. “Hooya, ma’am. Carry on.” He turned to me. “Wander, you keep an eye on her. Hypothermia’s nothing to screw with.” He disappeared into a gauze of snow.
Munchkin pounded fists against the rocks.
“Look, I know you want this. We all do. Bad. But Wire knows what he’s talking about.”
“He plays games of the mind with me. He wishes me to quit. I will not quit.”
She knew better. We all did. Neither the SEALs nor anyone else played mind games with the future of humanity at stake. The only reason to wash out a soldier from GEF was to protect the mission. The human race had too much invested in each of us to wash out a single one for laughs or prejudice. But there were going to be training accidents, changes of heart, performance failures. There was a shadow force training in parallel. If a soldier stumbled, five thousand stood ready to replace her.
“Why do you want this so bad?”
“Eight reasons. My mother, my father, my six sisters.” Her voice caught.
I pulled her against me again while I watched the sky. The sun was weak these days, but I could tell it was going down.
Wire visited us two more times that miserable night during his rounds of the foxhole line.
Each time Munchkin’s battery was drawn down farther than schedule. Each time she shivered and seemed to shrink even smaller before my eyes. Each time Wire asked her if she insisted on continuing. Each time she snapped out a faded “Hooya.”
I finger-clipped her again. The needle on the battery meter didn’t move. I thumbed the readout button to show her body temperature. It was down a half degree since last check.
I felt like crap. But Munchkin was dying. “Munchkin, what’s four times three?”
She stared through me and her lips quivered, but she said nothing. A first symptom of hypothermia was the inability to answer simple questions.
“That’s it. Let’s go to the command post. You’re done, Munchkin.”
She might have been on the edge of hypothermia, but through her fog she understood.
“N-no!”
“We still have six hours to go. Wire will pull the plug on you next time he comes by if I don’t.”
I grabbed her under the arms and heaved her up.
“No, you bastar‘!” Slurred speech, too. Another symptom. She pushed out her arms and legs against the foxhole walls, wedging herself in like a cork.
“I’m not a bastard! I’m trying to save your life!”
Weak as she was, she thrashed and kicked. My frozen shin burned where her boot toe thwacked it.
“What life, Wander? This is all I have left. Think what it would be like if you didn’t have something, somebody.”
I thought about it every day. Until now I believed I was the only one.
I stopped tugging at her and thought. What if roles were reversed? If I was going to lose my spot in the Force? There had to be a solution.
I finger-clipped myself. I had 40 percent juice left in my battery, and my body was humming at a toasty 98.6. “Turn around.”
“Wha?”
I slung her like a flour sack, unzipped the battery compartment on her fatigues, and snapped her dead battery out of the socket.
I pretzeled my arm to pop my own battery out, plugged it into her socket and popped her dead one into mine.
“Whaju do, Wander?”
“Nothing. Snuggle up, Munchkin.” I wondered whether I could feel more miserable.
Three hours later I knew I could.
I shook inside my field gear so hard that I thought I would rattle Munchkin’s teeth loose. The wind had picked up and howled as it drove snow in the darkness. But her body temperature had risen a hair.
Wire’s flashlight bobbed toward us through the night.
“Hooya, troops! Anyone for a cold beer?”
“F-fuck you, Mr.Wire!”
“Yes, ma’am!” He squinted at her. “Don’t we sounc perky all of a sudden.”
He finger-clipped Munchkin, read his meter, ther shook it and read it again. He looked at her, then at me.
“Munchkin, what’s three times two?”
She didn’t shake as she looked him in the eye. “Six.”
He finger-clipped me. “My, my. Wander, you have beer busy. Your battery is stone-dead. And your body tempera tore is falling. It’s gonna be close, but I mink you wil barely make it to End-of-Test. And with 40 percent juice left, Munchkin will, too. How fortunate for both of you.”
Wire paused and rubbed his fleece face mask. “Wander, please step out of your hole and join me over here.”
He cupped a mittened wave as he walked out of Munchkin’s earshot.
Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Why did I always get caught? Metzger never got caught.
Wire turned and faced me. The snow blew so hard I couldn’t even see our foxhole. He shouted over the gale. “Wander, did you swap batteries with Munchkin?”
Judge March said that if the truth wouldn’t set you free, lie your ass off. “Negative, Mr. Wire!”
“I’m not asking for the bullshit teamwork answer. Did you?”
“Negative, Mr. Wire.”
He looked down and scuffed snow with his boot toe. “If she sucks batteries like that in combat, she can’t function. She’ll die. People in her unit will die when she doesn’t do her job. Worse, she will jeopardize the mission. This exercise isn’t hazing.”
“This exercise is bullshit. When we get Eternad batteries—”
“ If you get ‘em! If you get ’em, maybe they’ll change this exercise and she can get reassigned to GEE”
“You know anybody that falls behind will never catch up.”
He looked away. “It isn’t up to you or me to decide who stays and who goes. Look, I know you people stick together, and I’m not saying I want to trade places.”
He surely did want to trade places. SEALs trained a lifetime hoping to be part of a mission like GEF’s. They were the best soldiers on the planet. SEALs like Wire had the bad luck to have live families. So the politicians had pulled the rug from under them in favor of neophyte orphans like me and Munchkin. Life’s a bitch.
“We’re in the places we’re in, Mr. Wire. For better or worse, Munchkin’s my family. She wants to stay in.”
He nodded. “So. You’re already soldier enough to know mat in combat we don’t fight for duty and honor and country. We fight for the soldier next to us. That’s admirable. But mere’s no room for chivalry or for covering up a buddy’s weakness. If Munchkin’s not mission-capable, she should be dropped.”
“When we get better batteries she’ll be mission-capable.”
He sighed. “You can cover for her now. I can’t prove you swapped batteries. But you can’t cover for the whole training cycle. Protecting her now just prolongs the agony for her and endangers your unit. I respect your reasons for your decision. But I’ll watch you and Munchkin with special interest for the duration of this cycle. Are we clear?”
“Hooya, Mr. Wire.”
“This is the stupidest abortion of a training stunt I’ve ever seen! Just to give a stubborn half-pint a chance to get her ass shot off!” He paused, then shook his head. “A SEAL would do that.”
That was about as big a compliment as Wire was capable of to a non-SEAL.
“So. Because I do respect you people—and that’s no bilge—the additional physical training you’ll do to make up for what you missed during our little philosophical discussion here will be reduced. Push out one hundred for me.”
If somebody had pulled on me the stunt I’d just pulled on Wire, I’d have made ‘em do a thousand push-ups.
After the TET exercise ended, Munchkin and I limped stiff into the mess hall. We sat across from one another,
