told.
‘Handcuffs?’ Summer asked me.
I nodded.
‘For sure,’ I said. ‘And walk them to the brig. All the way.
Don’t put them in the truck. Let everybody see them. They’re a
disgrace.’
I got directions from a cavalry guy and took Franz’s Humvee to
go get Marshall. He was supposed to be camped out in a hut
near a disused range target, observing. The disused target was
described to me as an obsolete Sheridan tank. It was supposed
to be fairly beat up. The hut was supposed to be in better shape
and close to the old tank. I was told to stick to the established
tracks to avoid unexploded ordnance and desert tortoises. If I
ran over the ordnance, I would be killed. If I ran over the
tortoises, I would be reprimanded by the Department of
the Interior.
I left the main post alone, at nine thirty in the morning
exactly. I didn’t want to wait for Summer. She was all tied up
with processing Vassell and Coomer. I felt like we were at the
end of a long journey, and I just wanted to get it over. I took a
borrowed sidearm, but it was still a bad decision.
375
TWENTY-THREE
I
RWIN OWNED ENOUGH OF THE MOJAVE THAT IT COULD BE A plausible stand-in for the vast deserts of the Middle East or,
if you ignored the heat and the sand, a plausible stand-in
for the endless steppes of Eastern Europe. Which meant I was
long out of sight of the main post buildings before I was even a
tenth of the way to the promised Sheridan tank. The terrain was
completely empty all around me. The Humvee felt tiny out
there. It was January so there was no heat shimmer but the
temperature was still pretty high. I applied what the unofficial
Humvee manual called 2-40 air conditioning, which meant
you opened two windows and drove at forty miles an hour. That
set up a decent breeze. Normally forty miles an hour in a
Humvee feels pretty fast because of its bulk. But out there in
the vastness it felt like no speed at all.
A whole hour later I was still doing forty and I still hadn’t
found the hut. The range went on forever. It was one of the
world’s great military reservations. That was for sure. Maybe
the Soviets had a bigger place somewhere, but I would have
been surprised. Maybe Willard could have told me. I smiled to
myself and kept on going. Drove over a ridge and saw an empty
plain below me. A dot on the next horizon that might have been
376
the hut. A dust cloud maybe five miles to the west that might
have been tanks on the move.
I kept to the track. Kept going at forty. Dust was trailing
behind me like a tail. The air coming in the windows was
hot. The plain was maybe three miles across. The dot on the
horizon became a speck and then grew larger the closer I got to
it. After a mile I could make out two separate shapes. The old
tank on the left, and the observation hut on the right. After
another mile I could make out three separate shapes. The
old tank on the left, the observation hut on the right, and
Marshall’s own Humvee in the middle. It was parked to the
west of the building in the morning shade. It looked like the
same shoot-and-scoot adaptation I had seen at XII Corps in
Germany. The building was a simple raw cinder block square.
Big holes for windows. No glass. The tank was an old M551,
which was a lightweight armoured-aluminum piece that had
started its design life as a reconnaissance vehicle. It was about a
quarter of the weight of an Abrams and it was exactly the type
of thing that people like Lieutenarit Colonel Simon were betting
the future on. It had seen service with some of our airborne
divisions. It wasn’t a bad machine. But this example looked
pretty much decomposed. It had old plywood skirts on it
designed to make it resemble some kind of previous-generation
Soviet armour. There had been no point in training our guys to