a corporal no one can—well, no one knows what he’ll do.”
“But the corporal no one can predict might be the right one for this job,” Strenkofski added.
Logan sighed again, and faced him. “You were going to be de-commed,” Logan admitted. “So, as far as those still in the shit-storm are concerned, you’re blameless and at liberty to investigate a possible new weapon. A weapon, if it is a weapon, that we must control at all costs.”
“Full discretion, sir?”
Logan looked at Key with renewed exasperation. “You are one piece of work! No, not full discretion, Corporal. You don’t spit without clearing it with me, first, is that clear?”
“As a South Pacific sea,” Key said without pause or shame. “And my caveat?”
Logan nodded. “You’ve got your man.” The Captain paused. Then, as if trying one final attempt to come out ahead, Logan asked sarcastically, “Anything else you want, Corporal?”
No one was more surprised when Key rose from the wheelchair than Key himself. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I need to know what happened to my unit. We went out there a team—a team I’ve spent two years with. Now they’re gone and no one can tell me what happened to them. Are they dead, captured, or what? I need to go out there, find them, or find out what happened, then come back and tell you. I don’t know what else I’ll need to do that—personnel, tools, intel—but whatever it is, you’ll provide it. Yes?”
Logan rose to meet his eyes. For the first time the Captain showed Key something approaching respect.
“Yes, Corporal,” Logan said quietly. “If it’s within my power, you’ll have it.”
Chapter 5
If there was a thread that wove its way through Josiah Key’s military experience, it was assholes in bars.
No matter what continent, country, city, or town he was in, there they were: darkly brooding or overly friendly, full of bravado or deep in self-pity. He could set his watch by them. If he went into any establishment that served booze, there one would be, a woozy jerk-off looking for a fight.
Key understood, even appreciated, it. When you get up every day with a good chance of getting killed before you went to bed, the need to use your downtime wisely, constructively—get lost in alcohol—becomes a bit more pressing. And, if you went into the military seeking power, only to find out just how powerless you were, even with a big old gun in your hand, those folks you ran into…they tended to get a bit testy.
“Hey,” said the latest one. “You don’t belong here. This is a military bar.” By the slur of his voice, Key estimated he was on his third boilermaker.
They sat in a dark, low-ceilinged, yellow-lit, forty-by-sixty, glorified modular home unit lined with a bar, shelves, and stools that could’ve been anywhere in the world, but was, in fact, at the edge of the RAFO Thumrait air base in Dhofar Governorate, Oman—a large hop, skip, and jump directly east of Lemonneir and Shabhut.
“We are military,” Key told him, as he placed a hand on Daniels’ chest to keep him from using the drunk’s head like a fistful of beer nuts.
“No, you’re not,” Key heard the drunk slur as he started to turn away. “You don’t look it. Where’s your uniforms?”
Key took a second to consider their new lightweight, breathable, smooth, odor-eliminating, antibacterial, cool-to-the-touch, slightly shiny black pants, collarless jackets, and dark gray T-shirts.
“These are our uniforms,” he replied. Then he held open the left side of the jacket to reveal the Sig Sauer 9mm P229 automatic in its shoulder holster. “And these are our side arms. And these are our spanking new badges.” He held up his billfold and let it flap down to reveal a gold, blue, and red shield that announced USMC Criminal Investigation Division, Intelligence Activity.
“Nice, huh?” Daniels asked the drunk. The drunk suddenly shrunk, then slunk closer to the bar.
Turns out Logan had been as good as his word. Key and Daniels were reassigned and outfitted faster than Weicholz could protest. Key found exactly what kind of pull the Captain had when they waived the CIDSAC Special Agent Course, as well as the normally required six months of on-the-job training.
“This is a special assignment,” Logan had insisted, which apparently, was already agreed upon by the powers-that-were even before he arrived at Lemonnier.
“Oh,” said the drunk. “Oh, sorry.” He started to turn away, but hastily snapped his head back with a final word. “Sir.”
“Yeah, you better be sorry, bud.” Daniels growled. “We’re the military who can lock up drunken, pissant other military, right?
“Yeah, yeah, sorry, said I was sorry already,” the man muttered before returning to his fourth boilermaker. Key gave the seen-it-all bartender the universal sign of on me, which only added to Daniels’s disapproval and increasingly foul mood.
But rather than say what he actually felt, the sergeant groused instead. “Why didn’t that second louie assign you herself? Why did she hand you off to the chrome dome?”
“Ah, you know the corps.” Key shrugged. “Can’t wipe their asses unless the toilet paper’s in triplicate. Beside, he had to give Babs something to do or else he wouldn’t be able to justify keeping her around.”
Daniels stared sourly into his beer. “I want to screw that second louie.”
“I know, Morty, I know,” Key replied as if Daniels had commented on some bad weather. “But beyond that, you’re just pissed we’re not in Shabhut yet.” Key had wanted to hit Daniels’s release valve, and that was all it took.
“Yeah,” Daniels exclaimed. “What are we doing in this wasteland? I say screw regs, let’s just go. Just two guys, no backup, no ordnance. We’d be in and out before they even knew we were there.”
“That’s not what intel says,” Key reminded him with an edge of misery. “Intel says Usa Awar got Shabhut locked down tighter than a bull’s ass in fly season.”
“Fuck intel.” Daniels growled. “They couldn’t keep us out.”
Key shook his head sadly. “They couldn’t keep you out, maybe. I’m not such a great fan of standing on the railroad tracks with my arm out.”
“What?”
“It would be an empty heroic gesture, Morty. I told you about it before.”
“Remind me.”
“Bus of school kids caught on a railroad track. Hero stands there with his arm out as the freight train bears down on him. Everybody will talk about how brave he was, but he’s still dead, so are the school kids, and probably most of the folk on the train too. Better to figure out an effective way to save everybody than to make a big show of it.”
Daniels stared at Key like he had grown another nose. “Eh, who has time to listen to your shit?” he finally muttered.
He was about to turn his attention back to his beer when Key snapped, “That him?”
“What
