The Memories of Milo Morai

IV

With the dawning of Sacred Sun over the vast prairie, one of the young warriors, Djessee-Kahl Staiklee, set out with several spare horses to search out and bring back Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree to the rich treasure trove of metals that awaited them all in the ruined city of ancient times. He bore written messages from both Little Djahn Staiklee and Uncle Milo, as well as oral urgings from his peers to their own chiefs, sires and siblings.

Of course, he also bore his own eyewitness testimony to the lush verdancy of the well-watered prairie in the proximity of the ruins and of the profusion of the relatively unchary game animals thereabouts. All of these facts would constitute telling arguments in the favor of a movement of both clans, entire—women, children, horses, dogs, cattle, sheep, goats and all—rather than just a party of men to strip what they could from the ruins before rejoining families and moving on.

With plenty of food in camp, Milo took Gy, Djoolya, Little Djahn Staiklee and all but two of the other young warriors back to the ruins, this time with two carts and the proper tools for more thorough delving into those ruins. They hitched up the teams, loaded the carts, mounted and rode out in an icy drizzle borne on a strong but steady wind. However, by the time they came into the far-flung outskirts of the sometime city, the wind had weakened consider-ably, the drizzle had entirely ceased and Sacred Sun was again peeking here and there through the dissipating cloud cover.

All of the young men had seen other and larger ruins before, of course, for there were many of them athwart the main migration routes that served both wild herds and nomad clans, but all of these had been stripped and picked overyears agone. Gy and the young Teksikuhns were awed by the amounts and varieties of the riches of these ruins that had lain for so long untouched.

Milo shooed them all away from the automotive hulks, saying, “Save that scrap metal for the clans to hack apart. The traders give much better barter goods for made artifacts that still are sound and usable. Let’s see if we can finda hardware or a farm-supply store.”

They found one of each type of store a few blocks south of the tall building area and soon had both carts filled with hand tools, small items of hardware, pots and pans of steel and cast iron and copper, rolls of chain, some galvanized buckets, and two enamelware sets of cups and plates and bowls which caught Djoolya’s eye, as too did a large reflector oven. They loaded in yards of verdigrised copper tubing and hundreds of yards of copper wire of various gauges.

Remembering the contents of the sealed fallout shelter cum tomb they had stumbled across out on the prairie, Milo was more than a little relieved to find that sometime in the distant past, the hardware store had been thoroughly stripped of firearms and ammo. Either those same looters or others of a similar bent had taken all of the bows but, strangely, had left behind nearly five dozens of fine bowstrings—individually sealed in plastic and still fresh and usable as they had been on the day they had arrived at the store, at least two centuries before Milo’s arrival. He also found a plastic box containing two dozen hunting heads of tempered bronze, the three edges of each still razor-sharp.

Investigation of a small pharmacy showed them evidence of an individual or, more likely, a group interested in drugs and nothing else. The shelves of the prescription section had been stripped absolutely bare and even the nonprescription analgesics were gone, but the remainder of the stock of the pharmacy and the attached variety store was as intact as long, long years of baking heat and freezing cold and the incursions of rodents and insects had left it.

Djoolya came over beaming to show Milo her find of a handful of stainless-steel combs of various sizes, and Milo did not tell her that they had been intended for use on dogs and cats. The nomad woman was also beside herself with joy when she found a small cache of sewing supplies—fine needles, straight and safety pins, assorted buttons, thimbles and a full bucketload of spools of thread in shades and colors the like of which she had never before seen.

One of the rarer finds was that of an entire shelf of quart-size apothecary bottles, vacuum-sealed and containing still-edible dry-roasted peanuts, and just as many pint-sized jars of the same kind filled with cashew nuts or almonds; they could eat the nuts, then trade off the colored-glass jars to the easterners for less fragile merchandise.

Despite the amounts of meat already in camp, the young warriors delightedly vied with each other in knocking over squirrels, hares, rabbits and game birds on the way back to camp. Little Djahn Staiklee took the pot-hunter prize by neatly smashing the head of a purplish torn turkey with a shrewd cast of his carven throwing-stick, just as the torn had lifted from off the ground, big wings beating furiously. Under those circumstances, a head hit was not even to be expected, and Milo privately wondered just how much of the kill had been skill and how much pure, blind, stupid luck, but aloud, he joined fully in the praise of the young man’s expertise.

Back at the camp, the gleanings were, as usual, spread out and equally divided among each yurt—Milo’s, Bard Herbuht’s, Gy’s and that of the young warriors. Some would go into immediate use of the nomads, some would be wrought into decorations or useful purposes, the remainder would be traded off whenever they crossed the trail of the eastern traders.

The contents of one of the larger jars of peanuts made an exotic and tasty addition to that night’s soup pot. As soon as the rich soup, the assorted small fowl, and meat from yesterday’s kills and the turkey had been consumed, Milo was immediately pressed by all of the others—humans and cats alike—to once more open his memories that they might hear more of his life in that strange world of so long ago.

Alone in their shared bungalow bedroom, Milo sat buffing his cordovan oxfords, while Betty sat at an improvised vanity table combing her short hair.

“Milo,” she asked casually, “the doctors, have they yet reached any consensus as regards these three Germans?”

Holding up the shoe and examining it critically, Milo spat on the toe and once more went at it with the soft brush. “As a matter of fact, they have. Dr. Smith, who seems to be their spokesman, came to my office late this afternoon to give me the results of their conference. For him, he was quite excited, too. It seems that both Hizinger and Gries were connected with the buzz-bomb projects, both the V-1 and the V-2, from almost the beginning until right up to the bitter end.”

“And you then telephoned General Barstow with the message, love?” she said, continuing her long, slow, steady brush strokes.

“I tried to, but he was somewhere off post—the girl didn’t seem to have any idea when he might be back or where Sam Jonas might be, either. So I guess now it’ll have to be morning before I get the info to him and he gets into personal touch with Smith. After that, you know the drill well enough; they’ll fuck around with papers and bureaucratic shit for one or two days before the transport finally comes to take this lot to wherever they go from here.”

Laying down the brush and turning about to face him, she said, “Good. I will be very glad to see these three go. Valuable scientist or not, this man Gries nauseates me. He never ceases to voice his complaints over the loss of his beautiful estate in the Sandland, the lands and the buildings and the loot from all over Europe with which the main house had been furnished and decorated. The way he goes on with complaint after complaint, one would think that Germany had won, rather than lost, the war.”

Milo stopped his buffing and nodded. “I know what you mean. I’ve heard Gries carry on about his unfair losses. But that damned Faber is the one who gets to me. He’s lodged a formal complaint after almost every meal he’s eaten here—he apparently expectshaute cuisine and vintage wines out of an Army messhall. Of the lot, I find that haughty, arrogant bastard Hizinger the easiest to stomach, oddly enough.”

She nodded back to him. “I know. That man is dead certain that Hitler is not dead, despite all evidence to the contrary. He makes it abundantly clear that he only is marking time, staying alive long enough to greet and participate in the reborn Dritten Deutschen Reich. Even so, he is more admirable a man than that Gries.”

“Milo, I’m just as sorry as hell, but I don’t know where the general went, where he is now or when he’ll be back. He sent me over to Fort Useless yesterday, and while I was gone he took off, no note, no message, no nothing. I think he’s trying his level best to worry me into an early grave, that’s what I think. But look, if Judy is as sick as you say, I’ll have the dispensary send the meat wagon in there and get her to the doc out here; where she goes from there’ll have to be up to him. Neither you nor Buck know what might’ve caused her to start upchucking and running a fever? Something she ate, maybe?”

Milo sighed. “Sam, we all ate the same breakfast. She’s the only one who got sick. It could be flu, it could be a virus, it could be some kind of internal problem, hell, it could even be poison, I admit. But if it is, how come nobody else ate it? She can’t hold even water down, and with the diarrhea, too, she’s going to be dangerously dehydrated in a very short time. I have some few hard-earned medical skills, but administering IV fluids is definitely not one of them, so you’d better get that ambulance in here on the double and get her to somebody who can keep her going.”

Back at the bungalow, Buck asked anxiously, “Well, Milo, what’s the general say?”

“The general’s still not there, not anywhere on the post,” said Milo. “But I did talk to Sam Jonas and he’s going to send an ambulance from the dispensary to take her back there.”

“Thank God for that, at least, Milo, but she needs a real hospital. She’s terribly ill—a mere dispensary isn’t going to have the facilities to properly care for her.”

Milo looked down at the feverish woman, wrapped in a cocoon of GI blankets, her pale face running sweat, hugged up against herself and with her teeth chattering. “Buck, anybody could see that she’s in a bad way. Once that surgeon at the dispensary examines her, you know damned well that she’ll be on the way to the hospital over at Useless or somewhere. I just pray that whatever she’s come down with isn’t contagious. That would be all we’d need, in here.”

“And I’ve got to go with her, Milo,” said Buck in a no-nonsense tone. “Are you and Sam Jonas going to try to give me flak for that?”

“I’m sure as hell not,” declared Milo. “I don’t think that the general would, either. He’s very fond of her . . . and you, too. As for Sam, well, if there’s any flak from him, I’ll do the catching of it, Buck. You get cracking and pack what you think the two of you will need in hospital. I’m going back to headquarters and try to type you out an authorization to leave before the meat wagon gets here.”

“God bless you, mon ami,“said Buck humbly. “You are truly a good and caring man.” Suddenly he grabbed Milo’s hand and kissed the back of it, tears sparkling unshed in his eyes.

Back at headquarters, Emil Schrader was nowhere to be found, and Milo cursed silently; a typist he was not. Cranking the field telephone that connected the various buildings in the small compound, he rang up the WAAC barracks.

A near-baritone voice answered, “WAAC quarters. Staff Sergeant Stupsnasig speaking, sir.”

“Sergeant, this is Major Moray. I’m at my office and I need a fast typist, on the double. Can do?”

Milo was surprised at just how fast and accurate a typist the tall, beefy woman was. Her hands, bigger than his own and looking to have been intended for effortlessly crushing granite boulders into powder, handled the Underwood with consummate ease and quickly had the form properly filled out and ready for his signature. He was just signing it when Betty and Hugo strolled in, the two Germans, Hizinger and Gries, with them.

Immediately, Milo detected the air of something being wrong, felt his nape hairs prickle up and an inward sense of deep foreboding. But just then the gate guard unlocked the gate and the boxy field ambulance rolled through into the small compound. Outside the bungalow, Buck waved with both arms, and as the ambulance veered in his direction, he stepped back inside to reemerge with the blanket-swathed form of Judy in his arms, carrying her easily, tenderly.

When the vehicle backed up to the front of the bungalow, a medic hopped out and helped Buck arrange Judy in one of the litters. Then, with the rear doors still flapping open, the ambulance made for the headquarters building to pick up Buck’s egress pass.

At the point of two silenced, small-caliber pistols held by Betty and Hugo, Sergeant Stupsnasig had typed and Milo had signed four more passes. Milo was in a state of stunned shock, still barely able to comprehend Betty’s duplicity—so warm and loving, even more so than usual only short hours past, now so cold and detached and deadly of demeanor.

The brawny Hugo jerked Buck out of the ambulance with one hand and slammed the side of the silenced pistol against his head with the other. He took a grip on the blankets wrapped around Judy, but then let her go as the two Germans came out of the headquarters building to level his pistol on them while Betty, who had brought them out, turned and reentered, briefly.

“Give me the key to the telephone that connects to Barstow’s office, Milo. Give it to me immediately or I’ll kill you both, here and now.”

Milo eased up in his chair, fished a keyring out of his pocket and dropped it on the desktop. “What the hell is your game, Betty ... if that’s really your name? Those passes will get you out of this compound, but just how do you propose to get out of the main one?”

Picking up the keyring, she half smiled. “We shall crash through the gate, of course, in the ambulance. Why else do you think that I poisoned Judy than to get us an ambulance driver in here?”

He shook his head. “You’ll all be fried. That gate has enough voltage in it to—”

“Please, Milo, spare me. No, we will get through safely enough. The tires of the ambulance are rubber and therefore the vehicle will not be grounded. Hugo explained it all to me.”

“The machine gunners—”“ he began, only to be again interrupted.

“Those poor, soft-hearted American men will be most loath to fire on the so-sacred Red Gross emblem, and you know it. As for the jeep patrols, well-armed assistance awaits us only a kilometer or so away.

“You know, it is too bad in a way that I really am not the woman you thought you knew, Milo, for she could have been, I think, very happy with you in America, Because of that, I won’t shoot you, although I know I should . . . unless you try to stop us or come after us, that is.

“Doh svedahnyah, sweet Milo.”

At the back of the ambulance, she waved her pistol at Judy and brusquely said to Hugo, “Get her out of the ambulance, quickly.” Stepping into the back of the vehicle, she stepped through the cargo compartment to the front and showed the driver and the medic the business end of the pistol. “If you two want to be alive to get demobilized, you’ll do exactly as I say for the next few minutes.”

Staring wide-eyed at the black hole of the muzzle, the driver gulped once, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing, and said, “Yesma’am! Ah’ll sho’ly do enythin’ you says.”

Buck had been stunned by the blow from Hugo’s pistol, but not rendered really unconscious, and a whimper from the semiconscious Judy as Hugo jerked her body out of the ambulance and dropped her to the ground brought the short, wiry man into full awareness.

Standing in the doorway of the headquarters building, neither Milo nor Sergeant Stupsnasig ever could say precisely what happened then. At one moment, Hugo was turning to clamber into the back of the ambulance, and only an eyeblink of time later, he was lying thrashing in the dirt, shrieking dementedly, with blood bubbling up out of his mouth.

Betty appeared at the back doors of the ambulance, took but a single look at Hugo, then absently shot him twice in the forehead before slamming the doors shut.

Buck, blood pouring down from the lacerated side of his head, unnoticed, sat in the dust with Judy cradled in his arms, seemingly unmindful of anything else going on around him, crooning to her softly in French.

As the ambulance driver changed gears, Milo dove out of the doorway, came up with Hugo’s dropped pistol and began to rapid-fire offhand at the departing vehicle.

A deep voice spoke just behind him, saying,“ Hang on a second, major.”

He looked around just in time to see Sergeant Stupsnasig withdraw her hand from the front of her well-stuffed shirt. The hand was holding a Smith&Wesson revolver. The big woman dropped to a squat, took a two-handed grip on the snub-nosed weapon and, with five shots, blew out both of the rear tires of the ambulance.

As the big woman ejected the cases and began to stuff .38 caliber cartridges into the cylinder, the quiet of the post was suddenly broken by the whooping wails of sirens and the roars of jeep engines on the perimeters, almost drowning out the shouts of the guards. From somewhere not too far distant, around some of the twists and turns of the abominably sur-faced dirt road leading to the main post, came the un-mistakable sound of a .50 caliber machine gun firing short, controlled bursts.

Milo checked the magazine of the Colt Woodsman to find three rounds left, plus the one in the chamber. Cautiously, he began to walk over to where the ambulance had slewed to a halt just beyond the gate to the smaller compound. But before he reached it, the gates of the main compound swung wide to admit a half-track and a three-quarter-ton field car—the former mounting a .50 caliber machine gun and filled with armed troops, the latter mounting a large radio set and conveying General Barstow, who held a Thompson submachine gun and wore a field jacket over his class-A uniform.

Pulling around the half-track, the driver of the field car accelerated to halt, nose to nose, with the ambulance, turned off the engine, then drew another Thompson from a holder welded to the side of the car and, after arming it, stood up and pointed it at the windshield of the ambulance. Only then did Barstow swing down from the car and walk to the ambulance, his own Thompson leveled and ready, his forefinger not quite touching the trigger.

He opened the door and stepped back, saying, “You twosoldiers, get out, now!”

When the terrorized driver and the medic had rolled out the doors, Barstow stepped back to the rear and, careful to keep his head and body shielded, banged on the nearest door with the muzzle of his weapon. Raising his voice a notch, he said, “Betty? Tatiana? Whatever your name really is, there’s no way out now, never was, actually. So you and Hugo had better just come out quietly. Otherwise I’ll have to call my other vehicle over here and turn that ambulance into a sieve.”

Milo heard the general’s words as he approached, and just as he reached the senior officer’s side, he heard Betty’s reply: “Oh, no, General Barstow, you would not dare to do such a thing, not with these two rocket scientists here with me.”

Barstow laughed loudly, to be heard. “If Russian Intelligence is this easy to fool, we should do it more often. Tatiana, Tatiana, the two men in there with you and Hugo are not rocket scientists, they’re not even Germans . . . well, at least not anymore, not for some years. Formerly they worked for OSS; now they work for me, so you have no chips with which to bargain. I give you one minute to come out, then I’ll call over the half-truck with its heavy machine gun. Come on, Tatiana, I’m counting . ..“

Suddenly, from within, there came the phuutt-phuutting of the silenced pistol firing. The vehicle began to rock on its springs; there were several gasps and groans, punctuated by the sounds of flesh hitting flesh, solidly. Then the rear doors burst open and a tangle of three bodies rolled out onto the ground, feet, fists and a gunbutt flailing. Milo dived in and grabbed Betty’s wrist, then forcibly wrenched the weapon from her hand and tucked it into his waistband alongside the one that had been dead Hugo’s.

But even lacking the pistol, Betty seemed more than a match for the two ersatz Germans. Hizinger was already bleeding heavily from nose and mouth, and a shoe toe driven into his crotch sent him rolling out of the fight, clutching at himself and retching. Gries had finally managed to encircle Betty’s throat with his hairy hands, pinning her arms with his knees, but somehow she got her left arm free and smashed the heel of her palm upward against the tip of his nose. With a gurgling, gasping cry, the man slumped to the side and lay unmoving in a limp huddle, blood pouring out to pool under his face.

Barstow feathered the trigger of his Thompson and put three big .45 caliber slugs into the ground some inches from Betty’s head. “That’s enough, Tatiana. This is the end of the road, for you, on this operation, anyway. You should be shot or hung or, at least, thrown into a federal penitentiary for a helluva long time; but to be realistic, considering the numbers of communists and fellow travelers that Roosevelt allowed to infiltrate the government and, in particular, the Department of State, you’ll most likely just be told that you were naughty and shipped back to Russia, which is why we will have a few chats with you before we turn you over to higher authority.”

He turned his head and called, “Harrigan, grab a pair of handcuffs and come back here.”

In that short moment, Betty looked up at Milo and said, in Russian, “You know, despite everything, I think I really did love you, my love.” She closed her mouth, then crunched something between her teeth, and a split second later, her entire body stiffened spasmodically. Her spine arched, higher, higher, until only her shoulders and heels were touching the ground. Unbearable, bestial noises issued from her mouth, then her body slammed back to the hard ground, her breath came out in a long, ragged gasp, and her blue eyes began to glaze over.

Barstow cursed himself, feelingly, for several minutes.

Some hours later, in his office, with a cigar going well and the whisky poured, he said, “Milo, I’m sorry as hell about putting you through all this just past, but I had no choice, no options, in the matter.”

Milo just sat silent and listened. Not the reek of Barstow’s strong cigar, not the peat-smoke odor of the whisky could make him stop smelling the odor of bitter almonds that had arisen from Betty’s slack mouth when he had lifted her body to place it in the ambulance. In a part of his mind, he still was waiting to awaken from this long, detailed, horrible nightmare.

“Milo, we knew that there were two ringers in the operation, but we had no idea who, only that one was a man and one a woman. They or rather theirsuperiors, must have learned of this assignment of mine before even I knew just why I was being brought back Stateside. I had no inkling that I had been infiltrated until a week or so before I set you up in the small compound.

“Originally, as you must have guessed, the intention had been to house and feed and interview the subjects out here, where we were better set up for it. Then, when I was apprised that a Russky team was in my unit, I decided that it was just too risky to do it all in the preplanned way.

“Now, the only things that were known about the ringers was that they had both been in my Munchen operation—for what purpose we’ll never know. It was known that at least one of them had been a sleeper in the United States even before our entry into the war. A full-steam investigation narrowed the list of suspects, here, down to Ned, Hugo, Judy, Buck, Betty and you, Milo. So it was you six I sent to the small compound, along with enough others to make it appear normal, of course. I might’ve handled it better had I had a bit more time. Maybe then we wouldn’t’ve lost Herr Gries, Ned and Vasili.”

“Ned?” asked Milo.“Vasili? They’re dead?”

Barstow nodded grimly. “Yes. Hugo apparently shot them both just before he went to meet Tatiana Nikolayev . . . our Betty.”

“When did you find out it was Betty?” said Milo dully.

“Just yesterday,” replied Barstow. “The soldier who drove our mess steward over to pick up stores has been careless from time to time in making contacts with someone over on that base. When he was given two silenced pistols, he was observed, and immediately he was back on the road headed here, the person who gave him the pistols was picked up by our people and taken away. Fortunately for us, he had a very low pain threshold, so we had most of the scheme before that day was done, but he also had a weak heart and he died on us before we got every jot and tittle out of him.

“We had sent the two men you knew as Herr Hizinger and Herr Gries through in the normal way, along with a real, if nearly useless, Nazi bureaucrat who had been a midlevel paper shuffler with the rocket projects—that is, Herr Faber. Both Hizinger and Gries were born in Germany, and both lived there until the late 1930s, so it was thought that they could give convincing performances as ex-Nazis, and they were schooled and coached at some length about the proper responses to questions thrown at them by the three doctors. They did convince the learned doctors, I presume?”

“Oh, yes,” said Milo, his voice tinged with bitter-ness. “Dr. Smith was jubilant—he assured me that Hizinger and Grieswere the greatest thing since sliced bread. So Betty and Hugo meant to kidnap them, eh? How did they expect to get them to Russia, though?”

Barstow steepled his fingers and looked at Milo through them and the thick cloud of blue-gray cigar smoke. “I would not be at all surprised if there isn’t a Russian submarine cruising or lying somewhere just east of Hampton Roads, in Chesapeake Bay or even over in the James River or the York. A group of heavily armed men was to be waiting up the road to eliminate any pursuit, and a large, fast automobile was parked on a shoulder of Route 60, ready to receive Tatiana, Hugo, Hizinger and Gries. They would then have been driven to where a fast boat was moored. And we don’t know any more than that, that’s when the man we got most of the rest out of died. But we’ll get more—four out of the six we ambushed back up the road there were taken alive and are more or less sound.

“That we weren’t able to take Hugo or Tatiana alive is a blow, and I can only blame myself for not checking her mouth thoroughly before I turned my back on her for even an instant. I should’ve known better. She knew we’d break her, one way or the other, before we gave her to anybody else, and she knew she had a lot to hide, so she did her duty, the only thing she could do under the circumstances; she was a good operative, that one.”

“How is Judy?” asked Milo. “Betty . . . Tatiana said she’d poisoned her.”

Barstow nodded. “She did—she shared with Judy a small box of chocolates that you had supposedly given her last night. Judy, of course, had no slightest reason to suspect anything was amiss and ate two of the things right after her breakfast. Then when she got sick, she was too sick to tell anybody, even Buck. But the doctors over at the base hospital say that she’ll be fine in a few days, a week at the outside—they got her in time.

“But back to you, Milo. You’re some kind of fine shot to’ve been able to shoot out both rear tires of a moving vehicle with a strange weapon.”

“It wasn’t me that did it, sir.” Milo shook his head. “I did try, but I either missed or those twenty-twos just couldn’t make the grade against those heavy-duty truck tires. It was the WAAC sergeant, Stupsnasig, with a thirty-eight caliber Smith & Wesson she carries inside her brassiere.”

Barstow just stared, almost dropping his cigar from between his teeth.“Brunhild shot out the tires, you said, with a thirty-eight caliber revolver she carries where?”

“She has a stiff linen holster stitched inside her brassiere, she told me, sir. She carries a hammerless round-butt thirty-eight Smith & Wesson Terrier in the holster, apparently, at all times.”

“Did she happen to mention why, Milo?” asked Barstow.

“To safeguard her virtue, sir. She has a very low opinion of the motives of men,” said Milo.

Barstow chuckled. “Her opinion is probably sound. But she’s the last one I’d expect to need a thirty-eight snub to safeguard her body and virtue. God, man, that woman is bigger—and no doubt stronger, too—than half the men in the Army of the United States of America !”

He chuckled again, then added, “Nonetheless, I’m glad as hell that the beefy battleaxe had the gun and the skill to use it so efficiently. She’s a staff sergeant, right? Yes, well, I’ll bump her up to tech, and I’ll put a nice letter in her 201 file, too.

“As for you, Milo—“

“General,” Milo interrupted, “in the morning, you’ll have on your desk a letter from me resigning my commission. I’ve fought my first and my last skirmish in this new war of yours. I made it all through one war and I’m just sick and tired of seeing blood, of smelling fear, of watching people I know die. I have a promise to an old friend to fulfill, and I mean to fulfill it... if I can. At any rate, I want to get back to a life that doesn’t include shooting men and getting shot at for a living, that’s all.”

“But good God, man,” expostulated Barstow, “you’re a Regular, not just some damned homesick draftee. What kind of career do you think there’ll be for a fucking infantry officer in civilian life? Or do you intend to be a gentleman farmer, live on the Stiles fortune and raise thoroughbreds, up in Loudon County?”

Milo arose. “Whatever I do, general, it will sure as hell beat watching a young woman die of cyanide under a clear blue sky, and it will beat the hell out of loading her body into an ambulance. I don’t give a shitwho she really was or what she really was; she loved me and I was beginning to fall in love with her and I’ll be a damned long time forgetting her and the fact that it was your new dirty little undeclared war that parted us and killed her. You can admire Tatiana Nikolayev all you wish for being a ‘good spy’ and suiciding at the right time. But I’ll mourn Betty, if you don’t mind . . . and even if you do . . . sir.”

“Sit back down, Major Moray. That’s an order!” Barstow’s voice crackled with authority, and instinctively, Milo obeyed.

Then, in a warmer, more conversational tone, Barstow said, “Milo, if you have to blame someone for the woman’s demise, you are more than welcome to blame me. I think my shoulders are tough enough to bear that cross, too. So far as this ‘new war’ is concerned, however, you will continue to be a soldier in this war even as a civilian, because this war is one that will probably last far longer than did the last, more open war.

“Milo, Russian Communism is a devil’s brew of politics and something very akin to religion to its adherents. It bears many of the aspects of a proselytizing Christian religion—Padre recognized that fact early on, and that’s where his twisted little mind began to build his fables about the Pope being in a secret compact with Stalin—and now that the Nazis and Fascists are out of the road, it is going to start steam-rollering its way around the world . ., unless we are able to throw up a few roadblocks here and there, that is. And our job is not going to be made any easier by the fact that our current president and his predecessor both are admirers of Josef Stalin and have come to harbor a large number of men who more than just admire that red-handed butcher in some high places in our government.

“It will be up to us to try in every conceivable way to hold back the international Red tide until we can sufficiently inform the American people of the dangers—both foreign and domestic—that confront our nation and persuade them to vote out the elected officials who are soft on Communism, then pressure the new administration into rooting out the Red vipers now nesting in Washington.

“If we succeed in our purpose quickly enough, there will be at least hope for a world at peace and the war just concluded with Japan, Germany and all the rest will have been fought to some purpose, our dead will not have given their lives in vain. But if we are slowed, thwarted for even a few years, there will be one small, bloody war after another, in one small country after another, all fomented by the Communists as they attempt to take over the entire world. If that scenario plays for very long, the only end will be us versus them—the United States of America against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—and I cannot be at all certain that we would win such a war, even with our new bomb as a weapon.

“So go to your buddy’s widow, Milo. Marry her, settle down and sire children and breed horses and enjoy your life. Judging by your service record, you’ve earned such a life if anyone ever has. But, Milo, you might also pray every night that we succeed in all our aims, and quickly, else the world in which your children live may not be a very nice place.

“Don’t waste time writing me letters. I’ll see to the beginnings of your processing out, never fear.”