“Very impressive,” I said.
“Yeah, well, they’re the exception. Most of these KLA teams aren’t worth pissin’ on. Most haven’t done a damn thing since we put ’em in. You send ’em orders, and they call you back and complain that it’s too hard, or they say they’re doing it, but when you get the recce photos, you find out they didn’t do a damn thing. Waste of food and ammo.”
He kept studying my face as we talked. He had that perplexed look some people get when they’re trying to remember something.
I said, “So tell me, Sergeant Major, how well do you remember Akhan’s company?”
“Ah, a damned shame, that one,” he said, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully.
“A good unit?”
“Never really had a chance to find out. Great scores in training, but they got wiped out before they ever had a chance to strut their stuff.”
“Yeah, I heard they ran into a real butcher’s mart at that police station.”
“Yeah, a nasty business, that was,” he issued forth without the slightest hint of genuine remorse. Then the corners of his mouth twisted up, and his head canted to the side. “Hey, you ever been to Bragg?”
“Years ago. I was assigned there back when I was in the infantry.”
“Yeah, I knew I seen you before.”
“Five glorious years in the 82nd. Ooorah!” I said.
He lowered his voice. “Right, and I was Columbus’s first mate on the friggin’ Santa Maria. You don’t remember me, do ya?”
“Nope, I’m afraid I don’t.”
He winked. “’Course, you don’t. I didn’t recognize your name ’cause the outfit didn’t use names when we screened. We just gave you all numbers, so’s to make sure there was no favoritism or command influence. But I never forget a face.”
I looked at Williams and tried to place him. The voice was somehow disturbingly familiar, as were the eyes, but I couldn’t recall from where, and that worried me.
“Sorry, Sergeant Major, you’ve got the wrong guy. I never heard of the outfit.”
His smile broadened. “Remember the POW camp? Remember that big, surly asshole wearing a hood that kept kickin’ the crap outta you?”
This I remembered all too well. The outfit had a six-month-long test you had to pass in order to get in. About one in every twenty applicants managed to survive the ordeal. One of the passages the outfit expected all recruits to endure was two weeks in a POW camp that was about as brutally realistic as they could make it. For some reason, this huge interrogator who was working the hard sell developed a very nasty affection for me. He liked me so much, he made sure I got one-hour personal workouts with him every day. When he was done, I had two fractured ribs, a broken nose, and two missing teeth to remember him by.
“You were that prick?” I asked.
“Hey, no hard feelings.” He chuckled. “That was my job.”
“A job, huh? Well, you certainly seemed to enjoy it.”
That brought another chuckle. “Part of the job, too. We were supposed to make it look like we were having balls of fun, ’cause they figured that would scare the crap outta you guys.”
“It did,” I said very earnestly. “I dreamed about you for years.”
I didn’t mention that they were nightmares, but I was sure he got the point.
“Well, you were a tough little bastard. You shoulda broke and told me what I wanted to know. You’d of saved yourself a lot of agony. And it sure didn’t help, you being such a wiseass all the time. Did you know all those sessions were taped?”
“I guess I missed that. A guy gets a little preoccupied when he’s being bounced off walls and punched silly. You were very good at keeping my attention.”
“Yeah, well, there was one of those little tiny cameras in the corner ceiling. Every night, Colonel Tingle, the camp commandant, would review the tapes, and he’d get all over my ass for letting you mouth off at me that way. I told him after that first week you weren’t gonna break, but he kept scheduling you to come back.” He shook his head as though he were remembering some disastrous blind date. “You know, you being such a tough motherfucker, that’s what got you into the outfit. As I remember, you couldn’t shoot worth a shit.”
“Never could,” I admitted.
“So you left the outfit and became a lawyer?” he asked.
“Yeah. After five years, I decided I needed to preserve my mental health.”
“Hey, got that. I was there six years; probably one or two too many. That POW training thing was my final fling. They let me go after that.”
“You’ve been here ever since?”
“Yeah, it’s not a bad unit. Ain’t the outfit, but then, nothing else is.”
“I guess. Anyway, we’re both a little old for that stuff now.”
I walked over to the wall of communications consoles, and he followed me over.
“You’re in contact with all the teams inside the zone?”
“Yep.”
“I guess the teams have to make daily sitreps, don’t they?”
“Twice a day. One at first light, one at dusk. That’s why we have ten of these communications consoles. That way, we can handle the load and collect all the sitreps together.”
“Anybody ever miss?” I asked.
“Once in a blue moon. Not our guys, though. They never miss. It’s the KLA guys, they get sloppy sometimes.”
“What do you do when you don’t get a timely sitrep?”
“Try to initiate contact. We’ve never had to go beyond that, ’cause so far it’s always worked. If we still couldn’t get contact, we’d get a bird up immediately. And if that didn’t work, we’d get a recon team in there, right quick.”
“Why wouldn’t you just wait till the next sitrep time to see if they establish contact on their own?”
He looked at me like that was a spectacularly stupid question. “Come on, you know this shit. Those sitreps are their only lifeline. Miss even one and we start moving heaven and earth to find out what happened.”
“Were you on duty when Sanchez’s team was in the zone?”
“Part of the time, but I gotta tell you, Major, paesan to paesan, we’ve been told to watch what we say to you about that.”
I figured that Sergeant Major Williams and I had shared some pretty intimate times together. I mean, a certain amount of repartee develops between a beater and his beatee. So I pressed my luck.
“Who told you that?”
The smile had left his face, and he began shaking his head. “Can’t really say. But you better play this real smart. Don’t go actin’ like the same stubborn shit I remember. Might not have seemed like it, but that POW camp was just kid’s play. What’s goin’ down around here’s for keeps.”
Just at that moment a fella with a full bird on his collar, who looked like he just bit into a big, saucy lemon, walked over to join us. He glanced at me like I was the guy who had just deflowered his virginal daughter, then grabbed Williams by the sleeve.
“Excuse me, Sergeant Major, we’ve got another update to send to team four. Would you step over and join me?”
The colonel dragged Williams to a corner, then the colonel’s forefinger started doing a tap dance on Williams’s chest. I could see Williams’s feet shuffling, and I guessed he was getting his ears cleaned out pretty good. I can’t really say that bothered me all that much. I mean, the guy once spent two weeks beating the doo-doo out of me, and I don’t care what he said about it being just a job and all that. When someone spends about twenty hours turning you into pulp, you can tell whether he sees it as work or sport. Maybe that’s why he left the outfit after six years. Maybe the outfit sensed he was going over the edge. If they’d asked me at the time, I would’ve sworn he was so far over the edge that he’d hit the pitch-black bottom.
At any rate, the watchdogs were on to me, so I knew I wasn’t going to get any more help here. I retreated quietly and thought about Williams’s warning. There were lots of ways to interpret it. Maybe the word had been put
