Acts of War

TWO

Attorney Lowell Coffey II stood on the shaded side of a nondescript, six-wheel white trailer and touched the hem of his red neckerchief. He dabbed away the sweat that was dripping into his eyes. He silently cursed the hum of the battery-powered engine that told him the air-conditioning was running inside the van. Then he stared across barren terrain, which was dotted with dry hills. Three hundred yards away was a deserted asphalt road that rippled beneath the afternoon heat. Beyond that, separated by three barren miles and more than five thousand years, was the city of Sanliurfa.

Thirty-three-year-old biophysicist Dr. Phil Katzen stood to the attorney's right. The long-haired scientist shielded his eyes as he looked toward the dusty outline of the ancient metropolis.

"Did you know, Lowell," Katzen said, "that ten thousand years ago, right where we're standing, is where beasts of burden were first domesticated? They were aurochs — wild ox. They tilled the soil right under our feet."

"That's great," Coffey said. "And you can probably tell me what the soil composition was then too. Right?"

"No." Katzen smiled. "Only now. All of the nations in this region have to keep records like that to see how long the fanmlands'll hold out. I've got the soil file on diskette. As soon as Mike and Mary Rose are finished, I'll load it up if you want to read it."

"No, thanks," Coffey said. "I have enough trouble retaining all the goddamn information I'm supposed to learn. I'm getting old, y'know."

"You're thirty-nine," Katzen said.

"Not much longer," Coffey said. "I was born forty years ago tomorrow."

Katzen grinned. "Well, happy birthday, counselor."

"Thanks," Coffey said, "but it won't be. Like I said, I'm getting old, Phil."

"Don't knock it," Katzen said. He pointed toward Sanliurfa. "When that place was young, forty was old. Back then most people lived to be about twenty. And not a healthy twenty at that. They were plagued by rotten teeth, broken bones, bad eyesight, athlete's foot, you-name-it. Hell, today the voting age in Turkey is twenty-one. Do you realize that ancient leaders in places like Uludere, Sirnak, and Batman couldn't even have voted for themselves?"

Coffey looked at him. "There's a place called Batman?"

"Right on the Tigris," Katzen said. "See? There's always something new to learn. I spent a couple hours this morning learning about the ROC. Helluva machine Matt and Mary Rose designed. Knowledge keeps you young, Lowell."

"Learning about Batman and the ROC aren't exactly things to live for," Coffey said. "And as far as your ancient Turks are concerned, with all the planting and sowing and irrigating and rock-hauling those people did, forty years old probably felt like eighty."

"True enough."

"And their life's work was probably the same job they'd been doing since they were ten," Coffey said. "Nowadays we're supposed to live longer and evolve, professionally."

"You trying to say you haven't?" Katzen asked.

"I've evolved like the dodo," Coffey said. "Stasis and then extinction. By this time in my life I always thought I'd be an international heavy hitter, working for the President and negotiating trade and peace accords."

"Ease up, Lowell" Katzen said. "You're in the arena."

"Yeah," Coffey replied. "The nosebleed seats. I'm working for a low-profile government agency nobody's ever heard of—"

"Low-profile doesn't mean lack of distinction," Katzen pointed out.

"It does in my end of the arena," Coffey replied. "I work in a basement at Andrews Air Force Base — not even Washington, D.C., for God's sake — brokering necessary but unexciting deals with grudgingly hospitable nations like Turkey so that we can all spy on even less hospitable nations like Syria. On top of that, I'm roasting in the freakin' desert, sweat running down my legs into my goddamn socks, instead of arguing First Amendment cases in front of the Supreme Court."

"You're also starting to whine," Katzen said.

"Guilty," Coffey said. "Birthday boy's prerogative."

Katzen pushed up the back of Coffey's felted wool Australian Outback hat so it covered his eyes. "Lighten up. Not every useful job has to be a sexy one."

"It isn't that," Coffey replied. "Well, maybe just a little it is." He removed the Outback hat, used his index finger to wipe sweat from around the band, then settled the hat back on his dirty blond hair. "I guess what I'm really saying is that I was a law prodigy, Phil. The Mozart of jurisprudence. I was reading my dad's statute law books when I was twelve. When all my friends wanted to be astronauts or baseball players, I was thinking it'd be cool to be a bail bondsman. I could've done most of this stuff when I was fourteen or fifteen."

"Your suits would've been way too large," Katzen deadpanned.

Coffey frowned. "You know what I'm saying."

"You're saying you haven't lived up to your potential," Katzen said. "Well, ditto, ditto, and welcome to the real world."

"Being one disappointment among many doesn't make it sit any better, Phil," Coffey replied.

Katzen shook his head. "All I can say is, I wish I'd had you at my side when I was with Greenpeace."

"Sorry," Coffey said. "I don't hurl my body off ship decks to protect baby harp seals or stop six-foot-six hunters from setting out raw meat to draw out black bears.

"I did both of those once," Katzen said. "I got my nose broke doing one and scared the hell out of the harp seal doing the other. The point is, I had these pro bono slackers who didn't know a porpoise from a dolphin. What's worse was they didn't give a shit. I was in your office when you negotiated our little visit with the Turkish ambassador. You gave it everything and you created a handsome piece of work."

"I was dealing with a country that's got forty billion dollars of external debt, most of it to our country," Coffey said. "Getting them to see our point of view doesn't exactly put me in the genius class."

"Bull," Katzen said. "The Islamic Development Bank holds a lot of Turkish chits as well, and they expert a lot of pro-fundamentalist pressure on these people."

"Islamic law can't be imposed on the Turks," Coffey replied, "not even by a fiercely fundamentalist leader like the one they've got now. It says so in their Constitution."

"Constitutions can be amended," Katzen said. "Look at Iran."

"The secular population in Turkey is much higher," Coffey said. "If the Fundamentalists ever tried to take over here, there'd be civil war."

"Who can say there won't be?" Katzen asked. "Anyway, none of that is the point. You sprinted through NATO regulations, Turkish law, and U.S. policy to get us in here. No one else I know could've done that."

"So I had to cajole a little," Coffey said. "Even so, the Turkish deal was probably the high point of my year. When we return to Washington it'll be business as usual. I'll go to see Senator Fox with Paul Hood and Martha Mackall. I'll nod when Paul assures the senator that everything we did in Turkey was legal, that the soil studies you did in the east will be shared with Ankara and were the 'real' reason we were here, and I'll guarantee that if the Regional Op-Center program receives further funding we will continue to operate legally. Then I'll go back to my office and figure out how to use the ROC in ways not covered by international law." Coffey shook his head. "I know that's how things have to be done, but it's not dignified."

"At least we try to be," Katzen pointed out.

"You try to be," Coffey said. "You spend your career looking into nuclear accidents and oil fires and pollution. You make a difference, or at least you challenge yourself. I went into law to wrestle with real global issues, not to find legal loopholes for spies in Third World sweatboxes."

Katzen sighed. "You're schvitzing."

"What?"

"You're sweating. You're cranky. You're a day shy of forty. And you're being way too hard on yourself."

"No, too lenient." Coffey walked toward the cooler nestled in the shade of one of the three nearby tents. He saw the unopened paperback copy of Lord Jim, which he'd brought along to read. It had seemed an appropriate selection when he was standing in the air-conditioned Washington, D.C., bookstore. Now he wished he'd picked up Dr. Zhivago or Call of the Wild. "I think I'm having an epiphany," Coffey said, "like all those patriarchs who used to go into the desert."

"This isn't desert," Katzen said. "It's what we call nonarable pastureland."

"Thanks," Coffey said. "I'll file that next to Batman, Turkey, as something to remember."

"Jeez," Katzen said, "you really are cranky. I don't think being forty is what's doing this. I think the heat's dried up your brains."

"Could be," Coffey said. "Maybe that's why everyone's always been at war in this part of the world. You ever hear about the Eskimos fighting over ice floes or penguin eggs?"

"I've visited the Inuit on the Bering Coast," Katzen said. "They don't fight with each other because they have a different outlook on life. Religion is comprised of two elements: faith and culture. The Inuit have faith without fanaticism, and to them it's a very private matter. The culture is the public part. They share wisdom, tradition, and fables instead of insisting that their way is the only way. The same is true of many tropical and sub-tropical peoples in Africa, South America, and the Far East. It has nothing to do with the climate."

"I don't believe that about the climate," Coffey said. "At least, not entirely." He removed a can of Tab from the melting ice in the cooler and popped it. As he poured the soda into his mouth, he squinted back at the long, gleaming van. For a moment, the despair left him. That seemingly nondescript vehicle was beautiful and sexy. He was proud to be associated with it, at least. The attorney stopped drinking and caught his breath. "I mean," he said, panting after the long, unbroken swallow, "look at cities or prisons where there are riots. Or compounds like Jonestown and Waco where people turn into cult-kooks. It never happens during a cold spell or a blizzard. It's always when it's hot. Look at the Biblical scholars who went out into the desert. Went out men, stayed in the heat, came back prophets. Heat lights our fuses."

"You don't think that God could have had anything to do with Moses and Jesus?" Katzen asked solemnly.

Coffey raised the canto his lips. "Touche," he said before he drank again.

Katzen turned to the young black woman standing to his right. She was dressed in khaki shorts, a sweat-stained khaki blouse, and a white headband. The uniform was "sterile." Nowhere did she display the winged-lightning shield of the rapid-deployment Striker force to which she belonged. Nor was there any other sign of military affiliation. Like the van itself, whose side-mounted mirror looked just like a mirror and not a parabolic dish, whose walls were intentionally dented and artificially rusted and didn't show a hint of the reinforced steel underneath, the woman looked like she was a seasoned archaeological field worker.

"What do you think, Sondra?" Katzen asked.

"With all due respect," said the young black woman, "I think you're both wrong. I think peace and war and sanity are all questions of leadership. Look at that old city out there." She spoke with quiet reverence. "Thirty centuries ago the prophet Abraham was born— right there. That was where he lived when God told him to move his family to Canaan. That man was touched by the Holy Spirit. He founded a people, a nation, a morality. I'm sure he was as warm as we are, especially when God told him to put a dagger into the bosom of his son. I'm sure his sweat as well as his tears fell onto the frightened face of Isaac." She looked from Katzen to Coffey. "His leadership was based on faith and love, and he is revered by Jews and Muslims alike."

"Nicely put, Private DeVonne," Katzen said.

"Very nicely put," Coffey agreed, "but it doesn't contradict my point. We're not all made of the same obedient, determined stuff as Abraham. And for some of us, the heat makes our natural irritability worse." He took another long drink from his sweating can of Tab. "There's another thing too. After twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes of camping here, I hate the living hell out of this place. I like air conditioning and cold water from a glass instead of hot water from a plastic bottle. And bathrooms. Those are good too."

Katzen smiled. "Maybe you'll appreciate them a whole lot more when you get back."

"I appreciated them before I left. Frankly, I still don't understand why we couldn't have tested this prototype in the U.S. We have enemies at home. I could have gotten clearance from any number of judges to spy on suspected terrorists, paramilitary camps, Mafiosi, you-name-it."

"You know the answer as well as I do," Katzen said.

"Sure," Coffey said. He drained the can of soda, dropped it in the plastic trash bag, and walked back to the van. "If we don't help the moderate True Path Party, the Islamic fundamentalists and their Welfare Party will continue to make gains here. And then you've got the Social Democratic Populist Party, the Democratic Left Party, the Democratic Center Party, the Reform Democratic Party, the Prosperity Party, the Refah Party, the Socialist Unity Party, the Correct Way Party, and the Great Anatolia Party, all of which have to be dealt with and all of whom want their piece of the very small Turkish pie. Not to mention the Kurds, who want freedom from the Turks, Iraqis, and Syrians." Coffey used his index fingers to wipe sweat from his eyes. "If the Welfare Party does happen to take control of Turkey and its military, Greece will be threatened. Disputes in the Aegean Sea will come to a head and NATO will be torn apart. Europe and the Middle East will be endangered and everyone will turn to the U.S. for help. We'll gladly provide it, of course, but only in the form of shuttle diplomacy. We can't afford to take sides in a war like that."

"Excellent summation, counselor."

"Except for one thing," Coffey continued. "For my money, they can all take a flying leap. This isn't like when you took a leave of absence to save the spotted owl from loggers."

"Stop," Katzen said. "You're embarrassing me. I'm not all that virtuous."

"I'm not talking about virtue," Coffey said. "I'm talking about being committed to something worthwhile. You went to Oregon, did your on-site protest, testified at the state legislature, and got the problem solved. This situation is fifty centuries years old. Ethnic factions have always fought one another here and they always will. We can't stop them, and it's a waste of valuable resources even trying."

"I disagree," Katzen replied. "We can mitigate the situation. And who knows? Maybe the next five thousand years will be better."

"Or maybe the U.S. will get sucked into a religious war that'll tear us apart," Coffey replied. "I'm an isolationist at heart, Phil. That's one thing Senator Fox and I have in common. We've got the best country in the history of the world, and those who don't want to join us in the democratic melting pot can shoot, bomb, gas, nuke, and martyr each other until they're all in Paradise. I really don't care."

Katzen scowled. "That's one point of view, I suppose."

"Damn right," Coffey replied. "And I'm not apologizing for it. But there is one thing you can tell me."

"What?" Katzen asked.

Coffey's mouth twisted. "What is the difference between a porpoise and a dolphin?"

Before he could answer, the door of the van opened and Mike Rodgers stepped out. Coffey savored the blast of air-conditioning before the ramrod-straight general shut the door. He was dressed in jeans and a tight gray Gettysburg Campaign souvenir T-shirt. His light brown eyes seemed almost golden in the bright sun.

Mike Rodgers rarely smiled, but Coffey noticed the hint of a grin tugging at the side of his mouth.

"So?" Coffey asked.

"It's running," Rodgers said. "We were able to uplink to all five of the selected National Reconnaissance Office satellites. We have video, audio, and thermal views of the target region as well as complete electronic surveillance. Mary Rose is talking to Matt Stoll right now, making sure all of the data is getting through." Rodgers's reluctant smile bloomed. "The battery-powered son of a gun works."

Katzen offered him his hand. "Congratulations, General. Matt must be ecstatic."

"Yeah, he's a pretty happy fella," Rodgers said. "After everything we went through to put the ROC together, I'm pretty happy myself."

Coffey toasted General Rodgers with a swig from the water bottle. "Forget everything I said, Phil. If Mike Rodgers is pleased, then we really must've batted one out of the park."

"Grand slam," Rodgers said, "That's the good news. The bad news is that the chopper which is supposed to take you and Phil to Lake Van's been delayed."

"For how long?" Katzen asked.

"Permanently," said Rodgers. "Seems someone in the Motherland Party objects to the excursion. They don't buy our ecology cover story, that we're out here to study the rising alkaline levels of Turkish waterways and its percolation effect on the soil."

"Aw, jeez," Katzen said. "What the hell do they think we want to do out there?"

"You ready for this?" Rodgers asked. "They believe we've found Noah's Ark and that we plan to take it to the U.S. They want the Council of Ministers to cancel our permits."

Katzen angrily jabbed the toe of his boot at the parched ground. "I really did want to have a look at that lake. It's got just one species of fish, the darek, which evolved to survive in the soda-rich water. We can learn a lot about adaptation from it."

"Sorry," Rodgers said. "We're going to have to do some adapting of our own." He looked over at Coffey. "What do you know about this Motherland Party, Lowell? Do they have enough power to screw up our shakedown session?"

Coffey dragged the kerchief along his strong jaw and then across the back of his neck. "Probably not," he said, "though you might want to check with Martha. They're pretty strong and considerably right-of-center. But any debate they start will go back and forth between the Prime Minister and the Motherlanders for two or three days before it's brought to the Grand National Assembly for a vote. I don't know about Phil's excursion, but I think that'll give us the time to do what we came here for."

Rodgers nodded. He turned to Sondra. "Private DeVonne, the Deputy Prime Minister also told me that leaflets are being passed out in the streets, informing citizens about our plan to rob Turkey of its heritage. The government is sending an intelligence agent, Colonel Nejat Seden, to help us deal with any incidents. Until then, please inform Private Pupshaw that some of the people who'll be heading to the watermelon festival in Diyarbakir may be carrying a grudge as well as fruit. Tell him to stay cool."

"Yes, sir."

Sondra saluted and jogged toward the burly Pupshaw, who was stationed on the other side of the tents. He was watching the road where it disappeared behind a row of hills.

Katzen frowned. "This is great. Not only could I miss out on the chance to study the darek, but we've got a hundred million dollars worth of sophisticated electronics in there. And until this Colonel Seden gets here, all we've got to protect it are two Strikers with radios on their hips and M21s, which, of they use 'em, we'll get clobbered for because we're supposed to be unarmed."

"I thought you admired my diplomatic finesse," Coffey said.

"I do."

"Well, that was the best deal we could get," Coffey said. "You worked with Greenpeace. When the French secret service sunk your flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor in 1985, you didn't go out and kill Parisians."

"I wanted to," Katzen admitted. "Boy, how I wanted to."

"But you didn't. We're employees of a foreign power conducting surveillance on behalf of a minority government so that their military can keep am eye on Islamic fanatics. We don't exactly have a moral imperative to gun down locals. If we're attacked, we lock the van door, get inside, and radio the local polisi. They rush out here in their swift Renaults and deal with the situation."

"Unless they're Motherland sympathizers," Katzen said.

"No," Coffey replied, "the police here are pretty fair. They may not like you, but they believe in the law and they'll uphold it."

"Anyway," Rodgers said, "the DPM doesn't expect us to have that kind of trouble. At worst there'll be tossed watermelon, eggs, manure, that sort of thing."

"Terrific," Katzen said. "At least in Washington they only sling mud."

"If it ever rained here," Coffey said, "we'd get that too.

Rodgers held out his hand and Coffey passed him the water. After taking a long swallow the general said, "Cheer up. As Tennessee Williams once said, 'Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.' "