“That was a different armored cavalry regiment,” Kelly said, lifting himself by his left shoulder and feet so that he could hitch up his trousers. The Volvo had leather upholstery, and he was sweating enough to stick slightly to the seat cushion. “Close, but no cigar. These guys – ” They were coming to another checkpoint, and this time the gates were shut. The fencing gleamed in the headlights as the car paused for a soldier with a small flashlight to check Doug’s ID. The earth raked smooth around the postholes had a raw, unweathered look.
“These guys are a public relations unit,” Kelly said, trying to control his voice the way he would clean a bad signal on tape – trimming out everything but what communicated data, as if there were no such things as static, bleed-over, or fear. “The President needs troops for a parade, visiting brass wants to review something – you know the drill – the Twelfth takes care of it. Nicely painted tanks and APCs, troops in strack uniforms – you know. They even paint the roadwheels of the tanks. Rots the rubber, but it sho’ do look black from the reviewing stands.”
“You may pass, sir,” said the guard, and as the gate opened he saluted.
There was a second chain link barrier twelve feet within the first, with its gate inset further to permit a car to stand between the checkpoints while both gates were closed. The inner fencing was covered with taupe fiberglass panels, translucent and sufficient protection against anyone trying to observe the compound from ground level. The soldiers manning the inner guard post wore fatigues and carried automatic rifles with a degree of assurance very different from that of the Twelfth Cav guards with pistols in patent leather holsters.
The man who examined the credentials this time stooped to look at all three occupants of the car. He wore neither a unit patch nor rank insignia, but there were chevrons and rockers in his eyes when he met Kelly’s.
There but for the grace of God, the veteran thought, if his gift for languages was really a manifestation of grace rather than a curse. Being able to process intercept data in real time had put Tom Kelly farther up the sharp end than he ever would have gone if he knew only how to sight a cal fifty and handle twenty-ounce blocks of plastique. He’d spent a lot of years in places where discipline was something you had yourself because there was nobody around to impose it on you.
When the people who thought in hierarchies realized that Platoon Sergeant Thomas J. Kelly was both willing and able to make a major policy decision for the United States government, it made him very frightening.
“Christ, I’m scared,” Kelly said with a lilt and a bright smile to make a joke of it as the guard stepped away.
The woman in the back seat smiled with the precision of a gunlock. “I’ve read your file, Mr. Kelly,” she said as the gate squealed open. “If I had any doubt about the purpose of this exercise, I promise I wouldn’t be the person nearest by when you learned the truth.”
Doug glanced up at the rearview mirror again as he drove forward, his expression unreadable.
Within the second enclosure were four frame buildings, a number of cars – Continentals and a Mercedes, all with opera windows – and more armed men in unmarked fatigues. Incandescent area lights were placed within the fencing on temporary poles, throwing hard shadows and displaying every flaw in the peeling, mustard-colored paint on the buildings. They had probably been constructed during the Second World War as temporary barracks, and had survived simply because military bureaucracy misfiled a great deal more than it discarded.
Well, Kelly had once been very glad for a case of Sten guns hidden against need, decades before, in a warehouse in Horns. It wasn’t the sort of waste that bothered him.
Three of the buildings were two-story, but the fourth was one floor with a crawl space, like the shotgun houses built in rural areas at about the same period. It would have been a company headquarters and orderly room; now it was the prize which the troops billeted in the other three buildings were guarding.