The Enemy

“That’s a three-hundred-mile detour.”

“Two hundred and ninety-eight.”

“But you don’t know who she is.”

“She’s fairly senior. She drove her own Humvee out to the motel.”

“She has to be fairly senior. Kramer’s known her for a good spell, to make it worth driving a five-hundred-ninety-six-mile round-trip detour.”

I smiled. Anyone else would have said a six-hundred-mile detour. But not my brother. Like me he has no middle name. But it should be Pedantic. Joe Pedantic Reacher.

“Bird is still all infantry, right?” he said. “Some Rangers, some Delta, but mostly grunts, as I recall. So have you got many senior women?”

“There’s a Psy-Ops school now,” I said. “Half the instructors are women.”

“Rank?”

“Some captains, some majors, a couple of light colonels.”

“What was in the briefcase?”

“The agenda for the California conference,” I said. “Kramer’s staffers are pretending there isn’t one.”

“There’s always an agenda,” Joe said.

“I know.”

“Check the majors and the light colonels,” he said. “That would be my advice.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“And find out who wanted you at Bird,” he said. “And why. This Kramer thing wasn’t the reason. We know that for sure. Kramer was alive and well when your orders were cut.”

We read day-old copies of Le Matin and Le Monde. About halfway through the flight we started talking in French. We were pretty rusty, but we got by. Once learned, never forgotten. He asked me about girlfriends. I guess he figured it was an appropriate subject for discussion in the French language. I told him I had been seeing a girl in Korea but since then I had been moved to the Philippines and then Panama and now to North Carolina so I didn’t expect to see her again. I told him about Lieutenant Summer. He seemed interested in her. He told me he wasn’t seeing anyone.

Then he switched back to English and asked when I had last been in Germany.

“Six months ago,” I said.

“It’s the end of an era,” he said. “Germany will reunify. France will renew its nuclear testing because a reunified Germany will bring back bad memories. Then it will propose a common currency for the EC as a way of keeping the new Germany inside the tent. Ten years from now Poland will be in NATO and the USSR won’t exist anymore. There’ll be some rump nation. Maybe it will be in NATO too.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“So Kramer chose a good time to check out. Everything will be different in the future.”

“Probably.”

“What are you going to do?”

“When?”

He turned in his seat and looked at me. “There’s going to be force reduction, Jack. You should face it. They’re not going to keep a million-man army going, not when the other guy has fallen apart.”

“He hasn’t fallen apart yet.”

“But he will. It’ll be over within a year. Gorbachev won’t last. There’ll be a coup. The old communists will make one last play, but it won’t stick. Then the reformers will be back forever. Yeltsin, probably. He’s OK. So in D.C. the temptation to save money will be irresistible. It’ll be like a hundred Christmases coming all at once. Never forget your Commander-in-Chief is primarily a politician.”

I thought back to the sergeant with the baby son.

“It’ll happen slowly,” I said.

Joe shook his head. “It’ll happen faster than you think.”

“We’ll always have enemies,” I said.

“No question,” he said. “But they’ll be different kinds of enemies. They won’t have ten thousand tanks lined up across the plains of Germany.”

I said nothing.

“You should find out why you’re at Bird,” Joe said. “Either nothing much is happening there, and therefore you’re on the way down, or something is happening there, and they want you around to deal with it, in which case you’re on the way up.”

I said nothing.

“You need to know either way,” he said. “Force reduction is coming, and you need to know if you’re up or down right now.”

“They’ll always need cops,” I said. “They bring it down to a two-man army, one of them better be an MP.”

“You should make a plan,” he said.

“I never make plans.”

“You need to.”

I traced my fingertips across the ribbons on my chest.

“They got me a seat in the front of the plane,” I said. “Maybe they’ll keep me in a job.”

“Maybe they will,” Joe said. “But even if they do, will it be a job you want? Everything’s going to get horribly second-rate.”

I noticed his shirt cuffs. They were clean and crisp and secured by discreet cuff links made from silver and black onyx. His tie was a plain somber item made from silk. He had shaved carefully. The bottom of his sideburn was cut exactly square. My brother was a man horrified by anything less than the best.

“A job’s a job,” I said. “I’m not choosy.”

We slept the rest of the way. We were woken by the pilot on the PA telling us we were about to start our descent into Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. Local time was eight o’clock in the evening. Nearly the whole of the second day of the new decade had disappeared like a mirage as we slid through one Atlantic time zone after another.