Child, Lee – The Enemy
Also by Lee Child
KILLING FLOOR
DIE TRYING
TRIPWIRE
THE VISITOR
ECHO BURNING
WITHOUT FAIL
PERSUADER
THE ENEMY
ONE
A
S SERIOUS AS A HEART ATTACK. MAYBE THOSE WERE KEN Kramer’s last words, like a final explosion of panic in his
mind as he stopped breathing and dropped into the
abyss. He was out of line, in every way there was, and he
knew it. He was where he shouldn’t have been, with someone
he shouldn’t have been with, carrying something he should
have kept in a safer place. But he was getting away with it. He
was playing and winning. He was on top of his game. He was
probably smiling. Until the sudden thump deep inside his chest
betrayed him. Then everything turned around. Success became
instant catastrophe. He had no time to put anything right.
Nobody knows what a fatal heart attack feels like. There
are no survivors to tell us. Medics talk about necrosis, and
clots, and oxygen starvation, and occluded blood vessels. They
predict rapid useless cardiac fluttering, or else nothing at all.
They use words like infarction and fibrillation, but those terms
mean nothing to us. You just drop dead, is what they should say.
Ken Kramer certainly did. He just dropped dead, and he took
his secrets with him, and the trouble he left behind nearly
killed me too.
9
I waited.
It moved. It jumped ahead six degrees. Its motion was
mechanical and damped and precise. It bounced once and
quivered a little and came to rest.
A minute.
One down, one to go.
Sixty more seconds.
I kept on watching. The clock stayed still for a long, long
time. Then the hand jumped again. Another six degrees,
another minute, straight-up midnight, and 1989 was 1990.
I pushed my chair back and stood up behind the desk. The
phone rang. I figured it was someone calling to wish me a happy
new year. But it wasn’t. It was a civilian cop calling because he
had a dead soldier in a motel thirty miles off’ post.
‘I need the Military Police duty officer,’ he said.
I sat down again, behind the desk.
‘You got him,’ I said.
%Ve’ve got one of yours, dead.’
‘One of mine?’
‘A soldier,’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘Motel, in town.’
‘Dead how?’! asked.
‘Heart attack, most likely,’ the guy said.
I paused. Turned the page on the army-issue calendar on the
desk, from December 31st to January 1st.
‘Nothing suspicious?’ I said.
‘Don’t see anything.’
‘You seen heart attacks before?’
‘Lots of them.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Call post headquarters.’ I gave him the number.
‘Happy New Year,’ I said.
‘You don’t need to come out?’ he said.
k l0
arc as representanve o me general ,rnencan popmanon as you
can get. Death rate in America is around 865 people per 100,000
population per year, and in the absence of sustained combat
soldiers don’t die any faster or slower than regular people. On
the whole they are younger and fitter than the population at
large, but they smoke more and drink more and eat worse and
stress harder and do all kinds of dangerous things in training.
So their life expectancy comes out about average. They die
at the same speed as everyone else. Do the math with the
death rate versus current strength, and you have twenty-two
dead soldiers every single day of every single year, accidents,
suicides, heart disease, cancer, stroke, lung disease, liver
failure, kidney failure. Like dead citizens in Detroit, or Dallas.
So I didn’t need to go out. I’m a cop, not a mortician.
The clock moved. The hand jumped and bounced and settled.
Three minutes past midnight. The phone rang again. It was
someone calling to wish me a happy new year. It was the
sergeant in the office outside of mine.
‘Happy New Year,’ she said to me.
‘You too,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t stand up and put your head in
the door?’
‘You couldn’t put yours out the door?’
‘I was on the phone.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘Just some grunt didn’t make it to the new
decade.’
‘You want coffee?’
‘Sure,’ I said. %Vhy not?’