Countdown: The Liberators-ARC (2 page)

Seven years of war will do odd things to a man.

D-803, Kabul, Afghanistan

An air conditioner whined in the office window. The office was outfitted with the kind of furniture that looked good but didn't last. It was expensive, though, and still more expensive for having been shipped by air, at government expense. Nobody much cared about expense to the government, but everyone who wore or aspired to stars cared about image. And, it had to be admitted, while it would last the furniture gave the right image.

"Why won't the son of a bitch just resign and go away?" whined the commander of all special operations forces in Afghanistan, Major General Jeff McPherson, a tall, confident-looking redhead, careful touch of distinguished gray at his temples, who harbored a deep suspicion that unauthorized persons had been test driving his young and lovely wife. The not-entirely-unfounded suspicion tended to cloud his judgment, especially his moral judgment. Still, to be fair, for ordinary purposes, when he wasn't doing stupid things like having his subordinates, though tasked to blend in with bearded locals, shave, or salute in the field, or any number of other things that set his troops' heads to shaking, he could be competent. And no one had ever questioned his physical courage.

The problem, from the general's point of view, was that while one could court-martial lower ranking officers, noncoms, and junior enlisted, court-martialing a senior officer indicated a flaw in the system. From the Army's point of view, this was highly suboptimal. People, as individuals, could be flawed but to admit to a systemic problem? No, no; that was just unthinkable unless the blame could be pinned on some outside, malevolent, foreign agency. The KGB had once been good for that.

And since colonels had been promoted five times, and gone through numerous other checks, to include what amounted to a Department of the Army Inspector General witch hunt, court-martialing one indicated a systemic problem, indeed. Why, the Army had been known to promote a colonel to brigadier general, after discovering that the man was guilty as sin of forcing a subordinate to commit an act of forgery and fraud, to get him to resign. Anything but publically admit to a systemic problem. And a general officer who let a systemic problem out into public view? No more stars for him.

"Because he wants a court-martial," answered the-one starred Val-for Valerius-Pettigrew, tall, slender, and café au lait. "He told me, when I talked to him, that a court-martial is the only way he's ever going to be able to rake-and I quote-‘those miserable, incompetent, son-of-a-bitch, anti-Christ, pseudo-messiahs in Washington and Kabul over the coals as they so richly deserve,' unquote."

"But doesn't he understand what this will do to the Army? To the war effort? To himself?"

"He says the war is lost anyway, that it was lost, and again, I quote-"

"Spare me," said McPherson, holding up one halting palm. "So what do we do, Val? What do we do when the press gets wind of this?"

"I don't think they will, sir," Pettigrew answered. "Everybody in the village is either dead or dispersed to various well-guarded harems, or slaving in a factory somewhere in Pakistan or, maybe, India by now. The Afghans won't talk; they made a good profit off the sales and probably got their dicks wet as an added benefit. The SEALs and Welch's A-Team aren't going to say shit. Look up the word ‘reticence' sometime. Any decent dictionary will show a picture of an SF operative, or a SEAL, or a Ranger, or even a Marine, seated on a witness stand, with his mouth thoroughly closed."

Pettigrew's face grew soberly amused. "Besides which, sir, do you realize we haven't had a lick of trouble anywhere within fifty miles of that village since the . . . ummm . . . incident. In an area that used to see firefights two or three times a day. The people there are scared shitless of supporting the other side now. Course, that will change as soon as word gets out that Stauer's on trial."

"There'll be no trial," McPherson insisted. He went quiet then, thinking hard.

"Go back to what you said before," McPherson ordered, rolling his hand in a backwards circle over his desk.

"We haven't had a lick-"

"No, not that. Before that."

Pettigrew thought hard for a moment. "You mean about reticence and our people, SEALs, Rangers and Marines?"

"Yeah . . . those." McPherson's face lit with a wicked grin. "So he wants a court-martial, does he? I wonder if he wants all those others, people just like the ones he committed mass murder for, court-martialed, too."

Man, you really do have shitty moral judgment, thought Pettigrew. Makes me glad I boffed your wife.

"And that's the deal, Wes," Pettigrew told him later that afternoon. "You retire, without prejudice, or Welch and his team, and Thornton and his team, get tried as accessories. Moreover, the red-headed bastard is going to turn your man, Mosuma, over to the Afghan authorities. They'll hang him, no drop."

"What a piece of shit," Stauer said with a sneer. "Almost makes me wish I'd fucked his wife."

"You mean you didn't?"

Stauer looked at Pettigrew with great suspicion. "You don't mean you did?"

"Well, what was I supposed to do? I gave her a ride home from the O club, where she'd been drinking, oh, to excess. Next thing I knew, her head's over my lap, and my brain is being sucked southward. Right on Riley Road. I fucked her in the post stables."

Stauer was about to chew out his long-time friend, viciously. But then, what's the point?

He laughed. "How was she?"

Pettigrew sighed. "Words can't describe, Wes. Words just can't describe."

***

"He'll do it, sir," Pettigrew told McPherson. "But there's a little problem."

"I see no problems."

"Well . . . both Biggus Dickus Thornton, Terry Welch, and the entire teams of both of them are punching out, too. That's Wes' condition; we have to let them go if we want to get rid of him and if they want out."

"Fair enough," said McPherson, relieved that the problem was going to go away. "Do they?"

"To a man, sir. Every one of them said the war is lost and it just isn't worth it. They said other things, too, but you don't want to hear those.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

-Tennyson, "Ulysses"

D-127, San Antonio, Texas

Like watching fish in a tank, Wes Stauer thought, looking at the thin traffic making its way along East Evans Road and down Bulverde. No, that's not quite right. It's like watching paint dry. Not even enough cars on the road to provide the hope of a decent accident.

He watched one of two identical two-seat cars pass the other anemically and sneered, Battle Song of the Proletariat Specials. Painted "Green," of course.

He shook his head. He could afford a decent, which these days meant an imported, car. Most couldn't anymore, after the tax bite took. Indeed, most who could afford any kind of personal transport these days could only support one of the designed-by-committees-of-special-interests things, like those two seat jobs asthmatically chugging up the road in front of Stauer's house.

Stauer didn't really care that much about the tax rates, personally. His home was held by a corporation masquerading as a religious organization he'd set up in Lebanon once upon a time. He paid the corporation, which is to say, himself, a very modest rent. The rent just matched depreciation and expenses, so there was no tax burden there. Likewise most of his money was overseas where Uncle's sticky fingers couldn't get at it. Oh, yes, the Internal Revenue Service took a whopping bite out of his retired pay, but that, in relation to his overall finances, was "mere."

Unpatriotic? Stauer mused. It's never unpatriotic to keep your government from wasting your money on things that shouldn't be done anyway.

Not that he was necessarily all that illiberal in every particular. He wasn't really, at least as far as domestic issues went. Student aid, for example, to send someone to school to learn to be an engineer? Or a doctor. Or, just as good, a machinist or plumber or farmer? Those kinds of things he was fine with, though he was rather finer with them if there was some price involved; teaching poor kids or providing health care in Appalachia, for example. Or military service, of course.

To take a masters on the public ticket in resistingbadevilhonkywickednaughtydeadwhitemaleoppressionandrepressionlittleEichmannismbadbadbadidness? I'm not precisely enthusiastic about that.

And he had the strong sense that the money collected to help the poor and even out the playing field was, in fact, mostly being spent on upper middle class drones with sociology degrees, Who sow not; neither do they reap, and construction contracts for the very well connected.

Case in point, he mused, that program to pay school girls not to get pregnant. They pay a hundred thousand inner city girls a thousand or so dollars a year, each, and ten thousand social workers ninety thousand a year, each, to administer it, and half the girls end up getting knocked up anyway. Case in point, the senatrix from California whose husband somehow just managed to land a three-billion dollar contract to build wind farms in a place with no wind, because, unfortunately, the Senator from Massachusetts has a vacation home overlooking the place where there really is wind. Case in point . . . ah, what the hell's the use?

And it's not entirely fair to blame the President for this, either. It was building up for years, since the nineties, anyway. Maybe the eighties. And maybe President Wangai made it worse; but maybe he didn't, either. Nobody was going to make it a lot better. You drink enough; you get a hangover. You spend enough; you get broke. Maybe we could have spent our way back to prosperity. I doubt it, but maybe. But, if so, we'd have to have spent on the right things. We haven't.

At least it's a little better here in Texas. A little.

Stauer'd thought he knew why he'd retired to San Antonio. To use the PX and commissary, to have Brooke Army Medical Center nearby when the time came for that. That's what I thought I was doing.

It wasn't those things, though. Or, at least, it wasn't entirely those. What the hell did I want? The facilities-he mentally shrugged-yeah, okay, sure. But I wanted the facilities someplace where I wouldn't be reminded of what I was missing. No sharp young troopers, fit as a fiddle and ready to fight. No listening in the morning air for the distant cadence I can't join in any more.

I do miss the Army.

And I didn't want to be in a purely Air Force town. And at least my arthritis isn't too bad here. And home . . . well, it hasn't been "home" in a very long time.

"It sure sucks to get old," Stauer muttered, "and I'm not convinced that the alternative is worse." He sighed, looking down toward his feet. Briefly, his eyes rested on his stomach. "Two years ago, you miserable bastard, you were flat." Traveling further downward, he scowled and said, "And don't you even think about getting old. At least you still have a purpose."

From inside the residence he heard the purpose's plaintive call, "Honey, come to bed."

Philomena Potter-Phillie, for short-stirred in the big bed, reaching for the man who should have been there but who now stood on the balcony. Her questing hands coming up empty, she awakened and sat up. Immediately she called out, "Honey, come to bed."

Phillie, ER nurse, aged twenty-seven, five foot, ten inches, thirty-five, twenty-three, thirty-six, was a quarter English-eighth German-eighth Irish-half Mexican self-propelled monument to mixed marriages. She had short blond hair that had not come out of a bottle, large emerald green eyes, and skin that was essentially white but tanned really, really well. Long legs were a given. She was quite pretty without being painfully so, having a regular, straight nose, full lips that were almost pouting, high cheekbones and a rather endearingly delicate chin.

She was also one of those not entirely rare human females predisposed toward older men. Perhaps "hard-wired" would be more accurate. Indeed, Phillie was so hard-wired for older men that she'd hung on to her virginity-technically, anyway-until well after turning seventeen, precisely so she'd be legal for the class of men that interested her. At the time, the minimum age for that had been thirty-five. She'd added a year and a half, on average, every year since. Her current lover-Wes Stauer, presumably sitting on the balcony watching life crawl by-was a little young by those standards. If young, he was also a soldier, had been, anyway, for about thirty years. That had the effect of making him look older. It was also the other area in which Phillie was hard-wired: Soldiers; yum.

Oh, she'd tried doctors, naturally enough, being an RN and all. Leaving aside the potential problems at work, she'd decided they were, on average, a bunch of arrogant pricks, and especially the specialists. She'd also tried Air Force types. The student pilots from Randolph AFB were interesting, but they were mostly arrogant pricks, too. And she tended to be taller than them, which was awkward and operated against the third area of her genetic predispositions. At six-two Wes is just about right. Why won't the bastard come back to bed?

The Special Forces medics, training at Fort Sam, downtown, had been her most enjoyable group. She'd even thought about marrying one of them. Then he'd been killed in Afghanistan and a colonel had come to tell her how very sorry he was and all, and how much the country appreciated . . . and that colonel had led to another colonel and that colonel . . .

***

"I'll be there in a few," Stauer called back. No I won't. Not tired, not horny, not even lonely. Just miserable. "Go back to sleep."

Nice girl, though, he thought. And, unlike most women that age, I can't say she has neither the charm of innocence nor the skill and grace of broad experience. And she's not even immature. She'd be a good match for an old fart like me. If I wanted a match. Family? I put all that off-"married to the Army"-and never missed it. And now I've no Army and no family. She says she wants kids. I just don't know if I'm up to it. Or if I'd be a decent father. And why the hell am I even thinking about this? I don't want to get married. Christ, I'll "be stone dead in a moment."