The Summer House

Chapter 84 Afghanistan

As casually as I can, I get up from the picnic table, leaving my cane behind — too blatant a sign of who I am — and I follow Cellucci and two other warrant officers as they walk back into the nearest building. The three of them are laughing and joking, and don’t notice me following them, and I hope the two MPs on the other side of the compound are doing the same thing.

They pass through a swinging plywood door, and I’m in a ready room, with couches, chairs, large-scale maps pinned up on the wall, flags from various states, and pennants from every type of sports team imaginable. Some Night Stalkers are seated, thumbing through magazines or playing with handheld video games.

Where to go?

Anywhere, I think, anywhere away from that door the MPs will eventually come through.

Once they get to me, check my ID, it’s done. Over.

And what’s going on back in Georgia?

Five times since I left Bagram I called Connie on my Iridium, and five times there was no answer. Once or twice I could believe it was due to some satellite problem or solar flare interference, but not five times.

I don’t like it, knowing she’s back there, riding herd on my crew, with a hostile and criminal county sheriff keeping an eye on everything, and her going to a meeting with a guy who says he knows the truth about the massacre.

I go down a narrow corridor with a concrete floor, more plywood doors and cubicles on it, and the smell is of aviation fuel, sweat, and ill-washed clothes. This smell is also called FAN, for feet, ass, and nuts.

The corridor opens into an operations center with computer screens, communications equipment — radios, secure telephones — and more maps and photographs up on the walls.

Boy, I really don’t belong here.

An officer with a colonel’s rank starts to get up and say something, and I turn around and take three quick steps, nearly knocking down Chief Warrant Officer Carmine Cellucci, who’s carrying a tan plastic bag in his right hand.

He laughs. “Hey, Major, there’re two MPs out there looking for a Major Cook who’s using a cane. What a coincidence, huh?”

I say, “You see me with a cane?”

“Ah, no, but the MPs will probably go beyond just that,” he says. “By the way, two years.”

“What?”

He takes my upper arm, starts leading me away from the inquisitive colonel back in the operations center. “You give me what you promised back there, except it’s for two years, not one.”

“Deal.”

“And it includes my girlfriend.”

“You’re pushing it, Cellucci.”

He stops, opens the plastic bag, and lets me look inside. A pile of Hershey’s chocolate bars, in their familiar dark-brown packages with gray lettering. “You need to pay to get in.”

I don’t hesitate. “Your girlfriend, too.”

He closes up the bag. “Good,” he says. “Just don’t tell the wife. C’mon.”

“But orders,” I say. “Paperwork. What changed?”

“Oh, a sweet coincidence,” he says. “One of the Little Birds in my company just finished a maintenance cycle. Somebody needs to take it up for a test flight, make sure the oil doesn’t leak or a screw doesn’t fall off. How does that sound?”

“Sounds great,” I say.

He takes me through a door to the outside and says, “We’ll be heading out in about an hour after I do a preflight check and get our gear together. By the way, what kind of investigation you doing, you need to talk to Kurtz about it?”

“A Ranger staff sergeant,” I say. “He’s up on murder charges, intends to plead guilty later today. I don’t think he did it. I hope Kurtz will back me up on this.”

“Where’s the Ranger being held?”

“Georgia,” I say. “And I think he’s in danger.”

Cellucci whistles. “Once spent six months in Georgia, training some of their pilots. Young and scared, and I’d be scared, too, with Russia and its shit-ass military right next door.”

“Not that Georgia,” I say as we approach a set of tents. “The one back in the States.”

“Oh,” he says. “That Georgia. Man, that could be worse.”

I say, “It certainly could.”

Another glance at my watch.

Time is still slipping away, and I’m so far from being where I need to be.