The Village (32 page)

“Good morning to you too,” the Secretary of Defense said. “Don't be so grumpy.”

“OK, so how many did we lose?”

“Less serious, a Marine missing in Kosovo. May be kidnapped.”

“We still have people there? And that's it—one missing?”

“Want me to add Armageddon?” the SecDef said. “I'm called when this stuff happens, and I call the White House. Now that you're awake, you can go to church. My good deed, like spotting you a couple of points.”

“Don't let one lucky squash game go to your head,” the Chief of Staff said. “OK, at least it's not a reporter or a spook or something with a press angle. I'll tell the President after he's up. When he was governor, I didn't wake him every time a cop had a bad day and I'm not going to start unloading small stuff now. What's the next step?”

“We're searching. We don't know who has him.”

“Damn, this is bad timing. We have to keep the decks clear for the health bill.”

“Right, it's an HMO plot to shift votes,” the SecDef said.

“All I'm saying is we have to stick to our game plan. It took a year to get back on track after the Twin Towers,” the Chief of Staff said. “Every military incident can't end up at the Oval Office. We've agreed the domestic agenda is the focus for the next Congress. You'll keep this across the river?”

“It'll be managed from Brussels or Kosovo.”

“Good, the farther away, the better. It's a distraction,” the Chief of Staff said, “and we can't do anything to help from here.”

25
TH
M
ARINE
R
EGIMENT
, M
ITROVICA
V
ALLEY

N
OON
, 21 D
ECEMBER

The security patrols for the meeting were to the north, inside the two-kilometer Red Zone marking the Kosovo-Serb border. To the south, the highway followed the river toward the open valley and the railhead at Pristina. There was a downward pitch to the road, as it paralleled the river rushing through ravines and gullies carved out of the limestone hills by centuries of spring snow thaws and heavy fall rains. Returning to the brigade compound the road was deceptively steep, and most trucks shifted into a lower gear. So did the three Marines running uphill with rifles slung over their right shoulders. They ran along the shoulder of the road, taking short, choppy strides at a fast shuffle, faces down, concentrating on a steady, grinding pace, no wasted motion, their boots barely clearing the surface of the thin snow.

They wore soft covers, not the German-style helmets adapted by the Americans, and none had on the flak jackets required of all U.S. troops outside the base. The three ran as if connected by a giant elastic band, sometimes stretching apart, then snapping back into a tight triangle. Each had an ALICE pack on his back, plus a large canvas water sack with a long, strawlike tube so he could drink as he ran. They were running up the grade, not jogging, the strain showing on their faces and in their stiff, quick stutter-steps.

They had left the base after full light, not wanting to be hit in the early-morning gloom by some bleary-eyed truck driver hauling in CDs or Gucci knockoffs or BMW parts from some chop shop in Albania. NATO forbade training in the mountains—it was too politically dangerous to train like soldiers—so the recon team had to stay on the main highway to Pristina, racing down out of the foothills to a turnaround point at twenty kilometers, then facing the grind back to the base, uphill the last ten kilometers. A full twenty-six-mile marathon carrying thirty-pound packs, four hours the target time. Not likely they could achieve that, but hey, what else to do on a Sunday?

For three hours the captain—the twin black cloth bars prominent on the lapels of his camouflage jacket—had been running with the single-minded lope of the Alpha wolf, sometimes allowing one of the other two to slip into the lead for a mile or so. As long as the lead shifted back and forth, all three stayed energized, a pack confident that together they could not be stopped.

Lang forced the pace, even when he wasn't in the lead, pushing so that the pain in his lungs blocked out his thoughts, shut out the world. He'd first learned to do that in boarding school at thirteen, when he would sneak into the gym after study hours and lift weights until he couldn't lift his arms, then press his face against the cold metal of his locker and cry.

How does the son of the captain of an oil tanker, with a divorced mother who never writes, fit into a New England boarding school? Work was Lang's escape. A few classmates had snickered about his fanaticism. That subsided when, at fourteen, Lang was named starting linebacker and Cos decided to be his roommate. Mrs. Cosgrove swept him into her orbit as another son, and between sports, studies, and school breaks spent with the Cosgroves, Lang learned how to smother his loneliness. Even then, Lang punished his body to distract his mind. And now he didn't want to think.

“Six miles to go,” Lang said, glancing at the GPS receiver held outside his breast pocket by a strip of Velcro. “Eight mikes for the last split.”

The other two said nothing, conserving oxygen. Eight minutes for a mile was excellent this late in the run, but could they hold that pace for six more miles?

Lang glanced at the sergeant clipping along feverishly at his side. Sergeant Herbert Caulder was a head shorter than Lang and looked a bit cartoonish, with a face too small for a neck and shoulders absurdly thick from too many workouts with heavy weights. He had the coiled energy of a downed power line. For Caulder, patience was torment. In the sniper championships at Lejeune, in half the allotted time, he put ten rounds into the black from the thousand-meter line, capturing first place and promotion below zone to sergeant E-5. A most unlikely sniper, he always wanted to get on with it, whatever it was. Now he was pumping his legs furiously, trying to sprint past the others, get out in front, gain the lead, get inside Lang's mind, and slow down the pace.

The upgrade worked against his strategy. He couldn't suck enough oxygen to open a lead. Each time he struggled ahead, Lang's long legs would pull him even. It wasn't fair. God should give everyone the same size legs. His pulse was at max. After the third fruitless sprint, Caulder eased off, gasping.
I'm a sniper,
he thought,
not an antelope
.

“I have a life after this death,” Caulder said, his stride shortening, “I'm reining it in.”

His face was pasty gray, slick with sweat. Lang slowed, trotting beside Caulder for several seconds, watching him. The third Marine did likewise. He was as tall as Lang and, like Caulder, had the three black chevrons of a sergeant on his lapels. He reached out and pulled Caulder to a halt.

“That's it. You're done,” he said. “Two pitchers last night, dummy. Drinking's not your thing.”

Caulder didn't reply. He leaned over and vomited as his companions jumped back.

“That's good. Solid test. I hope the monitors caught that,” the other sergeant said. “You should have seen him at Tun Tavern last night, sir. Standing on his head with a shot glass in his teeth, ass in the air. The troops were barking. The colonel was laughing. Totally embarrassing.”

Caulder breathed deeply and stood erect. “Don't listen to him, sir. Last night was a glorious moment. We're the dogs. No one can run with the big dogs.”

“Drinking upside down?” Lang said.

“My old man owned a bar,” Caulder said. “Learned that trick when I was ten. Some Saturday nights I'd get twenty bucks in quarter tips.”

“Now you've learned not to drink and run,” Lang said. “Sure you're old enough to drink?”

He flagged down a passing hummer, gesturing as though hailing a cab in New York City. After eleven weeks in Kosovo, everyone in the regiment knew all the officers. The humvee driver agreed to take Caulder back to the base.

Lang and the other sergeant resumed the run, matching each other stride for stride, agreeing to deduct a minute from their elapsed time because they had been so solicitous of Caulder.

“Caulder's crazy enough to take off after us, sir,” the sergeant said. “He doesn't know he's nuts.”

“Right,” Lang said. “Let's pick it up, Blade. That way Caulder can't catch up and totally dehydrate.”

In New York City, the reserves trained on the Combat Decision Range—a computer program which played combat missions. Sergeant Paul Enders made the right decisions so fast that throughout the regiment, he was called Blade. His hard body and relaxed manner—and family connections—had earned him an expanding clientele as a personal trainer to New Yorkers rich enough to be encouraged to sweat. Five hours of aerobics and weights a day gave Blade an advantage over the other recon reservists. And that's what he lived for—the weekend missions, the four hundred mile adventure races, the team against the elements.

His father the banker was forever urging him to stop wasting a first-class mind, chiding that five years ago he had wanted to be a ski instructor and now it was this “Marine Corps business”—another passing fad. Blade knew he was the classic spoiled only-child from East Side wealth, everything coming too easily. Except this. Making the team hadn't been easy. Still, this wouldn't last. Doc Evans said the experiment would be over after the deployment. If the team broke up, maybe he'd apply in January—Williams, Columbia, possibly Lewis & Clark, the flower-child college. He smiled, thinking of his dad's face going red. But now he had a race to run.

Even for Blade, the pace was harsh and he looked sideways at Lang, trying to read his expression. The captain was a big man, larger than Blade, with a body shaped by decades of weights, runs, and solitary weekends. His face was long, with the marathoner's anemic lack of flesh, cheekbones pulled taut like a bird of prey. His tight haircut exposed the back of his head, flat as the bottom of an iron, a gift from a mother who never picked him up or shifted him in his crib.

Around another bend they went, giving each other room, neither hogging the spots where the footing was firmer. Blade was determined not to let Lang gain a step. If Blade fell back, Lang would pick up the pace, sap his confidence, break his will to win.

Worked the other way too. Hell, the skipper was an old man, over thirty, and ten pounds heavier. That Lang won at long distance, as Blade saw it, was due to mental harassment. Lang distracted you, made some weird comment about a hot new actress or the Jets, took your head out of the game. Only not today. Sooner or later, he could beat Lang, he was sure of it.

Blade knew he couldn't think too much about Lang, who had been acting strange all morning. He had to run his own race, force the captain to worry about him, not the other way around. He wondered when Lang would try to unnerve him. Oh-oh, he was doing it to himself, letting his mind drift. Concentrate.

“Let's do seven thirties,” Lang said.

“Let's not,” Blade said. They were training, for God's sake, not trying to break their bodies. Seven and a half minutes for a mile, with a pack on? After twenty miles? Forget it. His lungs felt like a blast furnace. “We can't hold that pace. It'll take us a week to bounce back.”

He looked at Lang. Lang sped up without replying or turning his head.
He's in his own world,
Blade thought,
I don't exist.
He looked back to where the hummer was trailing them, three hundred meters behind. Caulder, plodding next to the vehicle, fluttered his hand, palm down, signaling Blade to fall back. Blade shook his head no.

Lang unslung his heavy rifle and held it at port arms, left hand under the barrels, right hand over the stock. It was an experimental design, ugly, with too much weight in the barrels.
This is it,
Blade thought,
Lang's latest psyche trick.
Blade reached for the sling of his M16A3, with its bulky telescopic sight, and imitated Lang—left hand under the barrel, right hand over the black stock aft of the trigger housing. Now they were even.

Lang didn't challenge Blade to exhaust himself, just lengthened his own stride, looked at the dull gray rock slabs bordering the road, and set off to punish his body. Wherever his mind was, it wasn't on the road.

“Caulder's on the road, skipper,” Blade said. “I'm dropping back with him. I can't hold this. You got it today, but you're going to be whipped for a week.”

Lang nodded, without breaking stride or looking to the side, in his own world. The run was a tunnel and the light at the end was the base gate. Four miles. For thirty more minutes of fire in the lungs, he could run away from what was hurting him.

Blade dropped to a slow jog, letting Caulder catch up. They were professionals out for a workout. They could go the distance when they had to, and they knew when to back off.

Lang hit the main gate in under four hours and slowed to a jog, then a walk, circling near the guard gate, waiting for the others. The base looked like a mini high-rise complex set inside a maximum security prison, with its perimeter of guard towers, berms, and chain-link fences topped with curled rolls of razor barbed wire.

“Did you do it?” Blade asked, when he trotted up several minutes later.