headed north.
‘It’s entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets you
there?’ Summer said. ‘What the hell is that about?’
We were on 1-95, still three hours south of D.C. Maybe two
and a half hours, with Summer at the wheel. It was full dark and
the traffic was heavy. The holiday hangover was gone. The
whole world was back at work.
‘There’s something heavy-duty going on,’ I said. ‘Why else would Carbone call Brubaker during a party? Anything less
than truly amazing could have waited, surely. So it’s heavy-duty,
with heavy-duty people involved. Has to be. Who else could
have moved twenty special unit MPs around the world all on
the same day?’
‘You’re a major,’ she said. ‘So are Franz and Sanchez and all
the others. Any colonel could have moved you.’
‘But all the Provost Marshals were moved too. They were
taken out of the way. To give us room to move. And most
Provost Marshals are colonels themselves.’
‘OK then, any brigadier general could have done it.’
‘With forged signatures on the orders?’
‘Anyone can forge a signature.’
‘And hope to get away with it afterwards? No, this whole
thing was put together by someone who knew he could act with
impunity. Someone untouchable.’
‘The Chief of Staff?’
I shook my head. ‘No, the Vice-Chief, actually, I think. Right
now the Vice-Chief is a guy who came up through the infantry.
And we can assume he’s a reasonably smart guy. They don’t put
dummies in that job. I think he saw the signs. He saw the Berlin
Wall coming down, and he thought about it, and he realized
that pretty soon everything else would be coming down, too.
The whole established order.’
353
‘And?’
‘And he started to worry about some kind of a move by
Armored Branch. Something dramatic. Like we said, those guys
have got everything to lose. I think the Vice-Chief predicted
trouble, and so he moved us all around to get the right people in
the right places so we could stop it before it started. And I think
he was right to be worried. I think Armored saw the danger
coming and they planned to get a jump on it. They don’t want
integrated units bossed by infantry officers. They want things
the way they were. So I think that Irwin conference was about
starting something dramatic. Something bad. That’s why they
were so worried about the agenda getting out.’
‘But change happens. Ultimately it can’t be resisted.’
‘Nobody ever accepts that fact,’ I said. ‘Nobody ever has, and
nobody ever will. Go down to the Navy Yards, and I guarantee
you’ll find a million tons of fifty-year-old paper all stored away
somewhere saying that battleships can never be replaced and
that aircraft carriers are useless pieces of new-fangled junk.
There’ll have been admirals writing hundred-page treatises,
putting their whole heart and soul into it, swearing blind that
their way is the only way.’
Summer said nothing.
I smiled. ‘Go back in our records and you’ll probably find
Kramer’s granddad saying that tanks can never replace horses.’
‘What exactly were they planning?’
I shrugged. ‘We didn’t see the agenda. But we can make some
pretty good guesses. Discrediting of key opponents, obviously.
Maximum use of dirty laundry. Almost certainly collusion with
defence industries. If they could get key manufacturers to say
that lightweight armoured vehicles can’t be made safe, that
would help. They could use public propaganda. They could tell
people their sons and daughters were going to be sent to war in
tin cans that a peashooter could penetrate. They could try to
scare Congress. They could tell them that a C-130 airlift fleet
big enough to make a difference would cost hundreds of billions
of dollars.’
‘That’s just standard-issue bitching.’
‘So maybe there’s more. We don’t know yet. Kramer’s heart
attack made the whole thing misfire. For now.’
354
‘You think they’ll start it up again?’
‘Wouldn’t you? If you had everything to lose?’
She took one hand off the wheel. Rested it in her lap. Turned
slightly and looked at me. Her eyelids were moving.
‘So why do you want to see the Chief of Staff?’ she said. ‘If