Hardy watches him, his belly snarling, practically drooling with hunger. He tries to guess what kind of sandwich the kid has. Ham and cheese with mustard? Turkey with tomato and bacon? One of those Cuban sandwiches they make around the corner with ham, roasted pork, salami, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard on Cuban bread?
His belly roars.
“Well,” Jackson says, “that’s fine, but all I’m saying is there’s only about thirty people down there. If you had a vaccine, surely you could give them a little.”
Hardy feels himself start to burst, but his large shoulders deflate and he shakes his head sadly. “There’s no magic cure, Stringer,” he says. “I wish there were.”
Then he sighs loudly and begins walking towards the door.
“Where’re you going, Dr. Hardy?”
Hardy pauses at the door. “To the labs, Stringer,” he answers in as heroic tone as he can muster, like something out of a movie. “I have a lot of work to do yet if I’m going to defeat this scourge.”
Then he snorts and leaves the Security Command Center in search of something resembling breakfast.
Chapter 4
New York has always seemed like a foreign country to me
Sergeant First Class Mike Kemper nods to Mooney and Wyatt, who are busy mopping up blood from the floor in the hallway, and enters Bowman’s makeshift office, all the while wondering if the LT is still cut out to command the platoon.
Kemper knows Bowman better than anybody in the unit, even better than Captain West does. It is his job to do so. The NCOs take care of the enlisted men in their unit. As platoon sergeant, however, part of his job is also to take care of and advise the LT.
Earlier tonight, the Lieutenant waffled over new orders and opened those orders up for debate by his NCOs. Then he ordered the platoon to fire on civilians.
Kemper showed Bowman the ropes for nearly a year in Iraq, and watched him mature into an intelligent officer who respects his men and leads from the front, not the rear. But this is an entirely new situation. In a horrifying situation like this, a commander can become indecisive, rash or both. Rash or indecisive commanders can get their men killed.
It was the right call to open fire on the civilians, given the size of the crowd attacking them. If Bowman hadn’t ordered the platoon to shoot, it would have been overrun and destroyed. But it turned out to be the right call only in hindsight. It could just have easily turned out to be a small group coming at them. In that case, the LT would now be considered an officer overeager to implement a new ROE allowing him to shoot civilians.
The point is the LT could have been wrong. Horribly wrong. And this has Kemper wondering whether Bowman made an intelligent, calculated risk or whether he panicked. He wants to believe it was a thoughtful decision, because he actually likes the man, but he isn’t sure.
He finds Bowman sitting in a pool of light from his task lamp, glaring at the radio on his desk. The LT looks up and gestures wearily. He’s not wearing a mask.
“If you’ve come to arrest me, I’ve already tried,” he says.
The Platoon Sergeant blinks. “Arrest you?”
“For violating Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Mike.”
“Murder?”
The LT nods and says, “For turning my men into a bunch of baby killers.”
“Hell, I was just coming to see if you wanted to do an After Action Review.”
Bowman says, “In a way. . . .”
Kemper sits, takes off his own mask, lights the stub of a foul-smelling cigar and sighs, exhaling a long stream of smoke.
“You want to know what I think?”
“Yeah, Mike. I do.”
It is a hard thing to explain, but Kemper is not concerned right now about the morality of shooting those people. Morality is a luxury in a situation like this. What worries him instead is the open question of the Lieutenant’s judgment.
A question to which he may never learn the answer.
“LT, what happened here tonight was a terrible thing, but you were acting within the ROE and had only a few seconds to make a decision to protect the platoon,” he says truthfully. “While a man’s conscience is one thing, the Army will say you made the right call.”
“That’s what Captain West said.”
“You told him what happened? What’d he say?”
“He said his own hands are full and that I should follow my fucking orders. End quote.”
Kemper leans back in his chair, absorbing this information.
“All this. . . . It doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“It makes no sense at all.”
“Have you talked to any of the other platoon leaders?”
“That’s just the thing, Mike. Quarantine is restricting the net to emergency traffic only. Something big is happening, and we’re isolated. I’ve got no intel. No big picture.”
Kemper is beginning to understand what is going on inside the LT’s brain. The situation has changed and with it, the ROE, and Bowman is trying to figure out why. If he understands why, he can make good decisions and, perhaps, justify to himself why he ordered his men to shoot down more than forty civilians in cold blood.
“Everybody’s feeling like crap right now and unfit to wear the uniform. Morale is shit. But we’re the professionals. We can’t appear indecisive in front of the boys. They need us to lead them.”
Bowman stiffens, then smiles shyly. “So this isn’t all about me then, is it.”
“No, sir, it ain’t,” Kemper says quietly.
“What’s so weird about this whole mess is it’s like this is a foreign country and we’re the enemy. I feel like we’re in this
“Sir, with all due respect, you think way too goddamn much.”
Bowman smiles grimly. “Mike, I just saw a cop shoot a wounded American citizen in the head. A cop who watched his best friends get ripped apart by a crazed mob in a rare terminal stage of a new disease. I’d say anything is on the table at this point.”
“We’re all tired.” The NCO exhales another cloud of smoke and grinds his cigar against his boot heel. “We’re wiped out. In any case, New York has always seemed like a foreign country to me.”
The LT regards him for a moment, then laughs out loud.
“It gives me an idea,” he says. “The situation demands that we treat the city as hostile. So we do just that. If your force is isolated in hostile country and you need to move from a place of security to a new AO, what’s the first thing you do?”
Kemper suddenly smiles.
“You reconnoiter,” he says.
