Red Metal

CHAPTER 3

Lieutenant Colonel Dan Connolly shifted his Ford F-150 into reverse and checked his rearview mirror as he backed out of his driveway. A car horn and the sound of screeching tires forced him to slam on his brakes. An angry Mazda driver honked again and then rolled off up the street.

“Check the flanks!” Connolly barked almost reflexively. He looked down at himself to see if he had spilled any coffee on his Marine Corps service “Charlie” uniform.

Nope, he’d dodged that bullet.

A voice behind him spoke with even more zeal than he had at this time of the morning. “Check the flanks!” It was his fourteen-year-old daughter, Elsa, and she was teasing him.

Sitting next to Elsa, Connolly’s twelve-year-old son, Jack, deepened his voice and repeated the mantra, doing his best impersonation of his Marine officer father. “Always check the flanks!”

The kids refocused their attention on their phones as their dad pretended not to be flustered by his near miss with the passing car.

Connolly checked over his shoulder more thoroughly this time, and then he backed out successfully on his second attempt. “What do I always say, kids? Mastering battlefield tactics is as much about repetition as it is about choosing the correct battlefield application.”

Jack mumbled without looking up from his phone. “Backing out of the driveway is totally a battlefield tactic.”

“At that moment the Mazda was the enemy. Stand by.” Connolly took a sip of coffee from a big red Marine Corps coffee mug emblazoned with the logo of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, one of his old units. He then placed it back in the cup holder. “Elsa, Mom’s taking you home this afternoon.”

“I know.”

“And, Jack, don’t forget you have baseball tonight. Mr. Marlon is picking you and Marko up from practice together. Also, you’re going to have dinner at the Tellaria house tonight. I’ll pick you up on the way home at about twenty hundred.”

“I know,” Jack said, still without looking up from his phone.

The kids were used to their dad’s tendency to go over the plan of the day each morning. It was a habit he’d picked up on his multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Marine lieutenant colonel pulled into the driveway of the school and waved to Principal Moody as he let his kids out. Jack and Elsa shot out of the Ford and melted into the throng of preteens and teens, heading into the building without even saying good-bye.

Connolly turned back onto Arlington Boulevard, this time headed east. He put on his right blinker and watched the car in the right lane speed up to keep him from merging into his lane. He fought his way in, using his truck as a large kinetic weapon, and soon he was listening to music on the radio and thinking about the day ahead.

It was good to be back home after years of near-constant deployments in the War on Terror. It had been a drain, and he had welcomed this two-year posting to D.C. for a chance to recharge his batteries and reconnect with his wife and kids.

He and Julie had been married seventeen years and this had been the longest stretch they’d been regularly living in the same house in the past decade.

His cell rang and he put his coffee down again to snatch it up. “Lieutenant Colonel Connolly.”

A computerized voice said, “This is the Walter Reed automated voice mail for the service member whose Social Security number ends in 4472 with a reminder that you have an appointment with… Commander Del Rey today, Thursday, twenty-five August, at… zero nine thirty hours. Please press one if you will make your appointment or press three to cancel.”

Connolly pressed “1” and listened as the automated voice thanked him and hung up.

These shit knees, he thought. If he didn’t get the damn things fixed, he would never be eligible for command again. He’d still had enough fight in him to ace his Marine Corps Combat Fitness Test the previous November, but his knees seemed to ache more and more each day, and by the time the cold weather came back around to D.C. and played havoc with his joints, he knew he’d need to find some way to loosen them up before the CFT this year.

Too many days jumping from seven-ton trucks or hiking around the desert, chasing twenty-something Marine infantrymen, he thought. And there was that time in “the Stan” when he got blasted down a hill in full combat load and landed feetfirst on rocks.

Whatever they grow up to be, I hope Elsa and Jack don’t become infantrymen.

After twenty-two years in the United States Marine Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Dan Connolly had held just about every “heavy lifting” infantry leadership position the Corps could throw at him. He had been a platoon commander in Camp Pendleton, California, in charge of twenty-six hard-charging Devil Dogs when he was just twenty-one and a fresh graduate from the Virginia Military Institute. A rifle company commander at thirty in Okinawa, Japan, which saw him deployed twice to Iraq. Then a battalion commander of the mighty “Betio Bastards” of the 3rd battalion, 2nd Marines, so named after their resolve in seizing and holding the line on a little speck of volcanic dirt in the Pacific during World War II.

At the ripe age of forty-three he had been selected by the Corps to command a battalion, but after eight deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations, it had taken every ounce of his six-foot-two-inch frame to keep up with the youngsters under his command.

Connolly hadn’t mentioned anything about his knees to anyone other than Julie, and there was good reason for that. If he told his superiors about the chronic pain, there would be some immediate benefit. The Marine Corps would do everything they could to take care of him. He would get great VA docs and all the treatment he needed.

But he would never get another infantry command. Any shot at a regiment would be blocked and the Corps would give the assignment to another man.

A fitter man, they would say, but Connolly would know it would just be someone better than he at hiding the years of built-up scar tissue and aching joints.

So Dan Connolly suffered in silence like many of his peers.

Going to the doc today would be okay, he told himself with only a little doubt. He’d minimize the chronic nature of the problem, get a couple shots of cortisone, and be good as new.

And if the treatment didn’t help, he’d just suck it up as best he could, keep popping Tylenol and taking long, hot showers, and he’d power on.

The news came on the radio as he drove down the parkway, and it instantly took the Marine’s focus away from his physical aches and pains.

“Shocking word out of Taiwan this morning as authorities there indicate members of the island nation’s own elite special forces have been implicated in the assassination of Taiwanese People’s Party presidential candidate General Sun Min Jiang. Experts agree that, if proven, the ruling party’s involvement in the killing of the opposition candidate and lead proponent of improving relations with Mainland China could have a devastating effect on Taiwanese-Chinese affairs. A speech by Chinese premier Fan Li-wei will be delivered in Beijing in moments, and China watchers expect a harsh condemnation of the Taiwanese government.”

Connolly shook his head in disbelief. He had been following affairs between China and Taiwan closely for his entire military career, and to him it made no sense for the government in Taipei to kill the opposition candidate. General Sun didn’t have a chance in hell of winning, and the government in power getting caught in the process, as they apparently had, could lead to a shooting war with China.

A war Taiwan could not win without U.S. involvement, and a war that would claim millions of lives.

Connolly knew his week would be affected by this morning’s news, and he worried he’d now have to reschedule his doctor’s appointment.

He glanced at the dashboard clock and saw it was 0740. He flipped his right blinker and watched the cars in the right lane all speed up to block him from merging. Typical D.C. drivers, he thought. They’d rather take a bullet through a headlight than yield to one car merging into their lane.

Connolly squeezed his big truck behind one of the offending vehicles and made his turn into the Pentagon’s south lot to hunt for a parking space.