‘Well,’ Marshall said as he rocked back in his chair. ‘It doesn’t seem that we’re in disagreement then. They can pay their share,’ he counted off with his thumb, ‘by meeting the petroleum needs of the deployment and by allowing full use of all bases and airfields.’
‘What about the Chinese?’ Jensen asked in a faraway tone. ‘Fuck the Chinese!’ Marshall said as he headed out the door.
Chapter Four
Nate and Lydia Clark sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor in their jeans. Nate held in his hands the front page of the Washington Post. A photograph of charred bodies lying beside an infantry fighting vehicle on the streets of St Petersburg dominated the page. He crumpled it loudly and stuffed it into a tall water glass, which he laid in the cardboard box with all the other plates and glasses. One room per day, that was the way they had always done it. Panama, Frankfurt, Kansas, Brussels, Washington — wherever Nate’s career had taken them.
‘Did Jeff tell his girlfriend we’re moving yet?’ Nate asked. Lydia rolled her eyes. ‘Not yet.’
‘You’re kidding!’ He laughed. ‘That’s pretty shitty.’
‘He’s in lu-u-uve! He just can’t bring himself to tell her.’
‘Is he taking it hard… the move, I mean?’
Lydia looked at him with a knitted brow. ‘Nate, he’s seventeen years old and has a girlfriend. He has to pull up stakes again and move thousands of miles away. Do you think he cares one whit that you didn’t get the Korean command?’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Nate lied. He avoided her face so as not to see the annoying grin that he knew she had fixed there. ‘Well,’ Nate said, ‘he’ll be fine in two weeks. I mean, Hawaii, for Christ’s sake! Once he gets a load of the girls on those beaches we’re gonna have to chain him to the bumper of the car.’
Lydia leaned over the box and kissed him. She looped her hands around his neck and pressed her forehead to his. It was always like this. The disruptions to their domestic routine that each new posting had brought were immense. But always they’d greeted the change with a sense of excitement. Always before, Nate thought, they had been on the way up. He gently prised her hands loose and resumed his packing.
Lydia left him to his thoughts for a while. Finally, she casually said, ‘What do you think about the China thing?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nate mumbled. The repetitive motions of packing served to wash away the grievances. A hundred times he had replayed in his mind the meeting with Ed Dekker. Each time, he’d improved upon the complaints he had failed to raise. Nate looked up at Lydia. ‘What China thing?’
‘You know,’ she said innocently. ‘I mean the possibility of going to war with China.’
Nate sat back on his heels. ‘What the hell are you talking about? Have those bridge club biddies over in Arlington been gossiping about…?’
‘About you and your professional slight?’ she confronted head-on, but lightheartedly. ‘Nate, really. They’re much more interested in who’s been sleeping with whom. Which of the young colonels on their husbands’ staffs married beneath himself. Important things like that.’
Then what are you talking about? Where do you get that kind of nonsense about war with China?’
‘Why, from you, dear, of course!’ she said, still smiling. She was toying with him.
‘I never said anything about… about that.’
‘Darling,’ Lydia said in a tone reserved for the dim-witted, ‘you’ve been talking about China this and China that for a week now. You’ve had the “C” volume from the Encyclopedia on our nightstand since the day you came home from your big meeting. The television is droning on in the background and all of a sudden your newspaper flies out of your face so you can watch a story about riots in Beijing. Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you have no respect for me whatsoever?’
Nate was a little disappointed that it hadn’t been something more. That the risks from an economically burgeoning China which was rapidly mobilizing its armed forces wasn’t the talk of the town.
‘Besides,’ Lydia said — leaning over to cup his cheek with her cool, soft hand — ‘why else would the Army take their very best general and put him in command of the whole Pacific?’
‘I’m not “in command of” the Pacific. I report to PACOM, and that’s a Navy billet, for God’s sake! I’ll be reporting to an Admiral.’
Lydia sighed noisily. ‘Good thing you’re not into all this political infighting crap. Just wanta do your duty for God and your country.’ Nate tilted his head and frowned. ‘Well, really! You were the one who had to be dragged kicking and screaming back to a desk job in Washington last year. I could’ve sworn you were having an affair with that tank you crawled all over in your dress uniform after your send-off.’
‘I didn’t know if I’d ever get another command!’ Nate shot back with more vehemence than he’d intended. He softened his tone as a means of apology. ‘I agreed to brown-nose my way through those offices and cocktail parties because that was the only way I’d ever get another one. Hell, I’ve practically crawled up the lower intestines of half a dozen joint staff officers.’
‘Don’t be crude,’ she said in a purely perfunctory manner. ‘Besides, you got one! A command! And a deployment to Siberia! As perverse as it may be, I’d think you’d be excited about that. What’s there to bitch about?’
He looked straight at her now. ‘It’s probably my last command, you know. No matter what Dekker says, USARPAC is a graveyard. I’m off the track. This time next year I guess we’re moving to some golfing community down in Florida, just waiting to die.’
‘Jesus Christ, Nate! You’re fifty-two years old. If you want to work, work!
‘Doing what? A glorified sales rep for some defense contractor? Pawning off overpriced toilet seats to O-6s over in Procurement?’
‘This time next year, who knows what the world will look like, Nate.’ He looked up at her, waiting for her to put together the broken pieces of his dreams. ‘You may know all kinds of facts and statistics about China from your encyclopedias and those files you keep locked in the safe upstairs. But there’s one thing I know that you don’t. I know what Chinese think about their place in the world.’
Nate sat back and took a deep breath, his gaze drifting off.
‘You listen to me, dammit!’ she snapped
Nate turned quickly to face her. ‘I’m sorry, Liddy.’ From her tone he knew this wasn’t Lydia-the-personal-therapist applying a verbal balm to Nate’s slowly healing bruises. This was the Lydia whom he’d met while getting his Masters in History at Berkeley — a degree being one of the better career tickets to get punched when there wasn’t a war on.
‘We Chinese had civil service exams a thousand years before Rome was built. We had masterpieces of art and literature long before the Greeks. When Ghengis Khan and his Golden Horde tore out of Mongolia to take over the earth, he made it all the way to Austria until the death of his father the king brought everybody home for the funeral. But in the twenty years of war against China — his neighbor just to the south — how far did he get? He only took over the northern half. And two hundred years later, the Mongols were so inbred they were Chinese!