He looked around the canteen. From his expression, he’d just as soon have swept it with a machine gun. “You lot,” he said. “Take a walk. Now!”
The trio nearest the doors were out before the order had been fully articulated. The cardplayers left their stakes on the table, and there was hand luggage beside several of the previously occupied chairs.
Hellfire Hank Tedeschi had no manners and no patience. He successfully completed campaigns in minimal time and with minimal casualties among his own troops, because there was absolutely nothing else in the universe that mattered to him. He would cashier an officer in a heartbeat, and he was rumored to have knocked down underlings who didn’t jump fast enough to suit him.
Tedeschi believed in leading from the front. He’d killed people with his pistol, his knife, and his bare hands.
“What’s this about you deserting your post, Barbour?” Tedeschi demanded. “The job here’s not done, you know.”
The anger previously in the general’s voice had been replaced by menace. Barbour knew this was an act Tedeschi had practiced, but it wasn’t merely an act. Tedeschi was a clever man as well as a violent one. As a means of intimidation, he let people see the raw emotions bubbling from his psyche.
“I’m not deserting, sir,” Robert Barbour said. “I’ve requested a transfer to another branch of the service.”
He didn’t add, “As is my right.” That would be pouring gasoline on hot coals.
“Like hell you are,” Tedeschi said. He gestured Barbour back into the chair from which the lieutenant had risen. “Sit.”
Barbour obeyed. Instead of sitting down across from Barbour, Tedeschi put one of his boots on the circular table and leaned his forearms against the back of his knee. “The job here needs you, Barbour,” the general said. “I need you. Are you hearing me?”
“Sir …” said Barbour. He didn’t know how to continue.
Tedeschi wouldn’t have given him the opportunity to go on anyway. “Look, what’s the problem?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you have a problem with the way I run things here?”
“Lord, no sir,” Barbour blurted. Tedeschi could have been back at Camp Able for all the effect he’d had on Barbour up till this moment. Lieutenants in the headquarters bureaucracy didn’t expect to have anything to do with commanding generals.
“Then your section CO, Wayney,” Tedeschi pressed. “Trouble with her? Tell me, boy, tell me now.”
“Sir,” Barbour said. Tedeschi was leaning forward, compressing his cocked leg and bringing his brutal, swarthy features threateningly closer to Barbour’s face. “Captain Wayney’s—she’s no problem, sir. She’s fine.”
Captain Wayney wasn’t a brilliant intelligence technician. To tell the truth, she wasn’t even a good one. But she was far too good an administrator to get in the way of an underling who was brilliant. Wayney not only handed Barbour the tough ones, she let him run with his whims. The result had been a series of striking triumphs for the section which Wayney headed.
“Look, I’ll make you a proposition,” Tedeschi said, leaning back a few centimeters. “You get an appointment on my personal staff. You report to nobody else, and I leave you the fuck alone. And you jump two pay grades to major. When this operation’s over, which I expect to take another six to nine months standard, you have the choice of accompanying me to my next posting—as a light colonel. Fair, Barbour?”
Barbour stared up at Tedeschi. He didn’t know how to respond. The whole thing was beyond belief.
Instead of reacting directly to the proposition, Barbour said, “Sir? Why are you doing this? There’s eighteen people in Technical Intelligence. You don’t need me.”
Half of Tedeschi’s face smiled. “Right, eighteen,” he said flatly. “All of them can do thirty percent of what you do. Two of them can do about seventy percent. That a fair assessment, Lieutenant?”
Barbour swallowed. If he’d thought about the question—which he hadn’t—he’d have figured that Hellfire Hank knew nothing about the operations of Tech Int. He was too busy running around in a combat car and biting the heads off Kairene guerrillas.
Dead wrong.
“Yes sir,” Barbour said. “Wellborn’s maybe better than that, but okay, that’s about right.”
“And not a cursed one of them can do the rest of what you do, the magic part,” Tedeschi said, his voice like a cat’s tongue, rough but caressing nonetheless. “I said six to nine months standard to finish the job.”
He slammed the heel of his right fist into his left hand, a sudden stroke and whop! that made Barbour flinch back. “I don’t need shooters, Lieutenant,” the general continued. “I got shooters up the ass, I got shooters better than me, and that’s plenty fucking good! The difference between six and nine is knowing where the bastards are to shoot. Do you see?”
“Sir,” said Barbour miserably. “I can’t do that anymore. Target people to be shot. I can’t.”
“Do you want people to die, is that it?” Tedeschi shouted, his face ramming closer to Barbour’s again. “If the operation goes the long way, it’ll boost our casualties by fifty percent. You know that, don’t you?”
Barbour nodded. Again, there was nothing wrong with the general’s analysis. There was a pretty direct correlation between losses and the length of time people were running around, firing live ammunition.
“Also about double the number of local wogs get greased,” Tedeschi added, “not that I give a flying fuck about that, but maybe you do?”
“I don’t….” Barbour said. “Sir, if I don’t do it, it’s not my responsibility. Sir.”
“That last operation,” the general said, “blitzing the headquarters of the Seventy-Three Bee regiment—that was fucking brilliant. That’s the sort of thing I need to get this operation over, quick and clean. Right?”
Barbour’s face formed itself into something between a smile and a rictus. He was afraid to speak.
“Come on, Barbour,” Tedeschi said. He took the junior man’s chin between a thumb and finger that could crush nutshells. He tilted Barbour’s face to meet his hard blue eyes. “Tell me that you’re going to stay with me till the job’s done. Not for the promotion. For the job.”
Barbour stood up carefully, lifting his chin out of the general’s grip. “Sir,” he said, staring at the wall beyond Tedeschi’s left shoulder, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that job anymore.”
Tedeschi slammed his boot back onto the floor. He wasn’t quite as tall as Barbour, but he had the physical presence of a tank.
“I’d spit on you, Lieutenant,” the general said, “but you’d foul my saliva. Go to fucking Cantilucca, fuck around on a survey team. You’re not fit to associate with the people doing real work.”
Tedeschi slammed out of the canteen.
A few moments later, other officers returned to their drinks and belongings. They looked curiously at Lieutenant Robert Barbour, who remained where the general left him.
Barbour was crying.
Earlier: Mahgreb
The incoming shells screamed down on Lieutenant Robert Barbour
like steam whistles pointed at his ears.
They’re landing short!
Barbour ducked in the fighting compartment of High Hat, the combat car in which he rode as a passenger. The regular crew, Captain Mamie Currant and her two wing gunners, didn’t react to the howls overhead. Barbour raised himself sheepishly as the first salvo hit beyond the grove 500 meters distant.
Black smoke spurted. A sheet-metal roof fluttered briefly above the treetops. The blasts of the four shells with contact fuzes were greatly louder than the remaining pair which burst underground.
“Party time!” cried the gunner at the left wing tribarrel. He waggled his weapon, but he obeyed Currant’s orders not to fire.
Currant’s driver and the drivers of the other thirteen operational cars in her company—three were deadlined for repairs—gunned their vehicles out of the temporary hides where they waited for the artillery prep. The combiner screen beside Currant at the forward tribarrel showed the separated platoons closing in on the village of Tagrifah from four directions, but the crew—including the captain herself—was too busy with its immediate surroundings to worry about the rest of the unit.