Mortal Allies

“Do you have any suggestions?” she finally asked me.

“Sure. Arrange an immediate meeting with Spears’s legal adviser and the ambassador. Except, if I heard right, the ambassador’s in a hospital in Hawaii. So maybe the embassy charge instead.”

“What for?”

“Mainly to hear what they’ve got to say.”

“Anything else we should do?” Katherine asked.

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Have a big breakfast. It’s going to be a long day.”

She and Allie and Maria didn’t want to eat a big breakfast, or any breakfast, which I can’t say displeased me all that much. I therefore went downstairs and ate alone. I stopped in the convenience shop first and picked up the newspapers for the past two days. These were issues of the Stars and Stripes, an overseas military newspaper that included excerpts from stateside Associated Press stories and lots of local news articles written by a regional staff based in Japan.

Updates on the Lee murder case filled the front pages of both days’ papers. As Clapper had warned, the case was every bit as much a lightning rod in Washington as in Seoul. Not only were the Republicans trying to usher through a bill to overturn the “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise, but a consortium of angry Southern Baptist fundamentalists were mustering a march on Washington to protest the godless policies of the President who had opened up the military to gays.

I was just finishing my second cup of coffee when Katherine and Keith swooped down. Keith looked handsomer than ever in a superbly tailored worsted gray flannel suit, with a silk handkerchief stuck out of his coat pocket that perfectly matched his necktie. He looked like one of the models you see in all those catchy men’s fashion magazines Army guys don’t subscribe to. Our fashion world is prescribed in tedious detail by something called a regulation that doesn’t leave you the least bit curious about what lapel cuts or tie widths are in vogue this year.

Katherine looked frantic. “We’ve got an appointment at the embassy in thirty minutes.”

“Have fun,” I mumbled, whipping the paper back up in front of my face.

She and Keith kept standing there, and I knew damn well what was going through Katherine’s mind. She wasn’t about to beg me to come along, but hey, she was way over her head on this.

I wasn’t over my head. I was swimming in my own metier, as the saying has it. But I also wasn’t about to come along – unless, that is, she did beg me. I can be real churlish that way.

She said, “Attila, I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to tag along.”

“Uh-huh,” I murmured, hibernating behind my paper.

“You know, this might be a fairly interesting session.”

“Bet so,” I idly mumbled.

“Come on, Attila. You coming?”

“I haven’t done the crossword yet,” I remarked indifferently.

Another moment passed. I heard Keith whisper something in her ear.

“Attila, please come,” she said.

“Hey, Moonbeam, my name’s not Attila,” I replied, pointing down at my nametag. Keith’s eyebrow shot up in the air at that one. He looked questionably at Katherine as though to say, Moonbeam? Then he smiled, because really, as monikers go, it fit.

She ignored him and said, “Okay, Major… Major Drummond… Sean. Please come.”

I put down my paper with an exaggerated sigh. “Be happy to. If you think I would be helpful, that is.” I looked up into her beautiful face and could see this was getting excruciatingly painful for her.

Her big green eyes got narrow and pointy, and her cute little lips shrank. “It could be helpful,” she said, with no effort to disguise her resentment.

“I’m sorry. Was that could be helpful? Or would be helpful?”

“It, uh… it would be helpful. Okay?”

I could tell I’d extracted about as much humility from her as I was likely to get. On this round, anyway.

“And how were you planning to get to the embassy?” I asked.

“I thought we’d take a taxi.”

“Won’t work,” I told her.

“And why not?”

“Because we’d never get there. Just a minute.”

I went to a phone by the hostess’s table. I dialed the operator and asked her to immediately put me through to the MP station. A desk sergeant with a brusque, uncompromising voice answered. I told him to connect me to the shift commander.

An only slightly more reasonable voice came on the line. “Captain Bittlesby.”

“Bittlesby, this is Major Drummond, co-counsel for Captain Whitehall.”

“Yes sir.”

“My other two co-counsels and I need to be transported and escorted to the American embassy. Immediately.”

“Is this trip authorized?” he wearily asked.

“Authorized by who?”

“By Major General Conley, General Spears’s chief of staff.”

“This just came up. There isn’t time for that.”

Sounding a little too happy, he said, “Too bad, then. Without Conley’s signature, nobody leaves base.”

I said, “Listen, Captain, we’ve got an appointment in twenty-eight minutes to meet with the acting ambassador. You could take that for authorization. Or, if you’d like, I’ll tell the ambassador, ‘Gee, I’m sorry, Captain Bittlesby says we can’t come.’ Then I’ll call the New York Times and tell ’em some captain named Bittlesby is trying to sabotage Whitehall’s defense.”

The thing with the Army is that a little bit of the right kind of coercion goes a long way. Soldiers don’t like to get crossways with diplomats. What they like even less is having to explain to their prickly bosses how they made it onto the front page of a nationally read newspaper in a distinctly unfavorable light.

Bittlesby said, “You wouldn’t really do that, would you?” He wasn’t really asking. He was taking the first grudging step in a full-scale retreat.

“Twenty-seven minutes, Captain.”

“Where are you?”

“We’ll be at the front entry of the Dragon Hill Lodge in thirty seconds.”

Half a minute later, Katherine, Keith, and I stood at the hotel’s entrance as three humvees with flashing yellow lights careened around the corner. Katherine looked at me and I shrugged nicely. It was the kind of taunting gesture meant to say, “Pretty cool, huh? Think you could’ve pulled it off?”

The first and last humvees were loaded to the gills with military policemen in riot gear. The middle one contained only a driver, also in riot gear.

I swiftly moved to the rear door of the middle humvee, yanked it open, and held it for Katherine. They don’t call us officers and gentlemen for nothing. But before I could react, Keith swiftly walked over and climbed in, brushing my arm softly and saying, “Thanks, sweetie.”

Katherine chuckled and climbed in the front seat. That left me to join Keith in the back. I could’ve strangled her.

By the time we got to the gate, it seemed apparent that the MPs had radioed ahead, because a platoon of South Korean riot police in blue uniforms were already shoving and hammering protesters aside to make a path for our convoy to get through.

Lots of angry, sullen faces glared at us as we passed through the crowd. It didn’t leave you with the impression you were among friends.

The ride to the embassy took just shy of thirty-five minutes. At the gate, once again, a platoon of South Korean troops in blue uniforms with riot shields and batons were beating a wedge through more protesters.

We dismounted at the front entrance and the young lieutenant in charge of the convoy came over. I told him