The Enemy (25 page)

"Should we have him picked up?" Summer said.

I shook my head.

"No," I said. "I'll do it myself. I'll go over there."

"Is that smart?"

"Probably not. But I don't want those guys to think they got to me."

She paused.

"I'll come with you," she said.

"OK," I said.

It was five o'clock in the afternoon, exactly thirty-six hours to the minute since Trifonov arrived back on post. The weather was dull and cold. We took sidearms and handcuffs and evidence bags. We walked to the MP motor pool and found a Humvee that had a cage partition bolted behind the front seats and no inside handles on the back doors. Summer drove. She parked at Delta's prison gate. The sentry let us through on foot. We walked around the outside of the main block until I found the entrance to their NCO Club. I stopped, and Summer stopped beside me.

"You going in there?" she said.

"Just for a minute."

"Alone?"

I nodded. "Then we're going to their armoury."

"Not smart," she said. "I should come in with you."

"Why?"

She hesitated. "As a witness, I guess."

"To what?"

"To whatever they do to you."

I smiled, briefly. "Terrific," I said.

I pushed in through the door. The place was pretty crowded. The light was dim and the air was full of smoke. There was a lot of noise. Then people saw me and went quiet. I moved onward. People stood where they were. Stock still. Then they turned to face me. I pushed past them, one by one. Through the crowd. Nobody moved out of my way. They bumped me with their shoulders, left and right. I bunped back, in the silence. I stand six feet five inches tall and I weigh two hundred thirty pounds. I can hold my own in a shoving competition.

I made it through the lobby and moved into the bar. Same thing happened. The noise died fast. People turned towards me. Stared at me. I pushed and shoved and bumped my way through the room. There was nothing to hear except tense breathing and the scrape of feet on the floor and the soft thump of shoulder on shoulder. I kept my eyes on the far wall. The young guy with the beard and the tan stepped out into my path. He had a glass of beer in his hand. I kept going straight and he leaned to his right and we collided and his glass slopped half its contents on the linoleum tile.

"You spilled my drink," he said.

I stopped. Looked down at the floor. Then I looked into his eyes.

"Lick it up," I said.

We stood face to face for a second. Then I moved on past him. I felt an itch in my back. I knew he was staring at me. But I wasn't about to turn around. No way. Not unless I heard a bottle shatter against a table behind me.

I didn't hear a bottle. I made it all the way to the far wall. Touched it like a swimmer at the end of a lap. Turned around and started back. The return journey was no different. The room was silent. I picked up the pace a little. Drove faster through the crowd. Bumped harder. Momentum has its advantages. By the time I was ten paces from the lobby people were starting to move out of my way. They were backing off a little.

I figured we had communicated effectively. So in the lobby I started to deviate slightly from a purely straight path. Other people returned the compliment. I made it back to the entrance like any other civilized person in a crowded situation. I stopped at the door. Turned around. Scanned the faces in the room, slowly, one group at a time, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Then I turned my back on them all and stepped out into the cold fresh air.

Summer wasn't there.

I looked around and a second later saw her slip out of a service entrance ten feet away. It had gotten her in behind the bar. I figured she had been watching my back.

She looked at me.

"Now you know," she said.

"Know what?"

"How the first black soldier felt. And the first woman."

She showed me the way to the old airplane hangar where their armoury was. We walked across twenty feet of swept concrete and went in through a personnel door set in the side. She hadn't been kidding about equipping an African dictatorship. There were arc lights blazing high in the roof of the hangar and they showed a small fleet of specialist vehicles and vast stacks of every kind of man-portable weapon you could imagine. I guessed David Brubaker had done a very effective lobbying job, up at the Pentagon.

"Over here," Summer said.

She led me to a wire pen. It was about fifteen feet square. It had three walls and a roof made out of some kind of hurricane fencing. Like a dog run. There was a wire door standing open with an open padlock hung on the chain-link by its tongue. Behind the door was a stand-up writing table. Behind the writing table was a man in BDUs. He didn't salute. Didn't come to attention. But he didn't turn away, either. He just stood there and looked at me neutrally, which was as close to proper etiquette as Delta ever got.

"Help you?" he said, like he was a clerk in a store and I was a customer. Behind him on racks were well-used sidearms of every description. I saw five different sub-machine gun models. There were some M-16s, Als and A2s. There were handguns. Some were new and fresh, some were old and worn. They were stored neatly and precisely, but without ceremony. They were tools of a trade, nothing less, nothing more. In front of the guy on the desk was a log book. "You check them in and check them out?" I asked.

"Like valet parking," the guy said. "Post regulations won't allow personal weapons in the accommodations areas." He was looking at Summer. I guessed he had been through the same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for Carbone's new P7.

"What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?" I asked. "Trifonov? He favours the Steyr GB."

"Show me."

He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the gun through the plastic.

"Nine millimetre," Summer said.

I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn't. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system.

All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don't all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won't cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I was a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I'd use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten.

Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.

"Got a phone?" I said.

The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar, twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my sergeant's desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal. The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer, putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek to work.

"Get me Sanchez at Jackson," I said.

I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two. "What?" Sanchez said.

"Did they find the shell cases?" I said.

"No," he said. "The guy must have cleaned up at the scene."

"Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk."

"You found the guy?"

"I'm holding his gun right now. Steyr GB, fully loaded, less two fired."

"Who is he?"

"I'll tell you later. Let the civilians sweat for a spell."

"One of ours?"

"Sad, but true." Sanchez said nothing.

"Did they find the bullets?" I said.

"No," he said.

"Why not? It was an alley, right? How far could they go? They'll be buried in the brick somewhere."

"Then they won't do us any good. They'll be flattened beyond recognition."

"They were jacketed," I said. "They won't have broken up. We could weigh them, at least."

"They haven't found them."

"Are they looking?"

"I don't know."

"They dug up any witnesses yet?"

"No."

"Did they find Brubaker's car?"

"No."

"It's got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and arrived at midnight or one o'clock. In a distinctive car. Aren't they looking for it?"

"There's something they're not sharing. I can feel it."

"Did Willard get there yet?"

"I expect him any minute."

"Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up," I said. "And tell him you heard the other thing wasn't a training accident after all. That should make his day."

Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer had stepped inside and she was shoulder-to-shoulder with the armoury clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing through his log book together.

"Look at this," she said.

She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries. Trifonov had signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimetre pistol at seven thirty in the evening of January 4th. He had signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.

"Why did he take it?'I said.

"We don't ask for a reason," the clerk said. "We just do the paperwork." We came out of the hangar and walked towards the accommodation block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers rides. Not many imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but mostly there were pick-up trucks and big Detroit coupds, some of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tyres. There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.

We detoured to take a look at it.

It was about ten years old. It looked immaculately clean, inside and out. It had been washed and waxed, thoroughly, within the last day or two. The wheel arches were clean. The tyres were black and shiny. There was a coiled hose on the hangar wall, thirty feet away. We bent down and peered in through the windows. The interior looked like it had been soaked with detailing fluid and wiped and vacuumed. It was a two-place car, but there was a parcel shelf behind the seats. It was a small space. Small, but probably big enough for a crowbar hidden under a coat. Summer knelt down and ran her fingers under the sills. Came up with clean hands.

"No grit from the track," she said. "No blood on the seats."

"No yogurt pot on the floor," I said. "He cleaned up after himself."

We walked away. We went out through their main gate and locked Trifonov's gun in the front of our Humvee. Then we turned around and headed back inside.

I didn't want to involve the adjutant. I just wanted to get Trifonov out of there before anyone knew what was going down. So we went in through the mess kitchen door and I found a steward and told him to find Trifonov and bring him out through the kitchen on some kind of a pretext. Then we stepped back into the cold and waited. The steward came out alone five minutes later and told us Trifonov wasn't anywhere in the mess.