Taylor almost interrupted Meredith a second time, anxious to ask for specific details. But he caught himself. He would wait until the S-2 finished his pitch. He did not want to risk revealing a sign of his weakness in front of his subordinates. Africa was far from their concerns at the moment.
"Kabata has always been involved with heavy forces and cutting edge technology," Meredith continued. "He's not only aviation-qualified, but he was reportedly a test pilot for a while. When he was younger, of course. Speaks excellent English, which he perfected as an exchange student at the British staff college at Camberly, class of 2001. Reputation as an Anglophile. Even flies to London to have his suits tailored. Kabata's not in the military because he needs a job. His family's wealthy, although they took a beating when we nationalized all of the Japanese-owned real estate in the United States. Their holdings were rather extensive. Anyway, the guy's from a powerful old family, with a long military tradition." Meredith paused for a moment, chewing the air. "But not everything tracks. His wife's a professor of linguistics, and they have two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter works in publishing. Son's a chemical engineer. And that's what doesn't follow. This family has been military since Christ was a corporal, and Kabata's had a career that's been highly successful by any standards. Yet, he reportedly discouraged his son from becoming an officer."
We're alike in that, Taylor thought. If I had a son, he would never be a soldier.
"Other than Africa," Meredith went on, "the highlights of his professional career include a voluntary tour on the United Nations' team that assessed damage and helped supervise the evacuation of the last Israelis to the United States. He was one of the few inspectors willing to enter the dead zone around Tel Aviv and the nuclear wastelands surrounding Damascus, Latakia, and the other sites targeted by Israeli retaliatory strikes."
"Merry," Lieutenant Colonel David Heifetz, the regiment's operations officer, interrupted. "I met him, you know. In Israel. It was only the briefest of meetings. He was on a committee of the UN that was sent to receipt for our weapons. Before we could get on the planes. He did not seem at all a bad man to me. Very much a decent sort of man. I felt… well, you know, he is a soldier. As we are all soldiers. And I felt that he understood what I was experiencing. Watching and counting as my men turned over their arms. It was a very bad day for me, and I felt that he did not want it to be any worse. That's all. I wish I could remember more. But other things were important to me then."
"Dave," Taylor said coldly, before Meredith could resume, "if he's such a great guy, why is he dumping nerve gas on refugee columns?"
Heifetz looked down the row of chairs toward Taylor, his face set even more earnestly than usual.
"I don't know," he said, voice tinged with genuine regret. "I cannot answer that question."
Taylor switched his attention back to Meredith. "All right, Merry. Tell us more about this… man."
Merry shrugged. "He's the sort of officer who seems to do everything well. Even writes. His reports on collateral damage from the Middle East were repeatedly cited at the International Conference on the Immediate Elimination of Nuclear Weapons the Soviets sponsored in New Delhi. That was," Merry said, "perhaps the last time Soviet and Japanese interests coincided. Over the past few years, he's been a key player in the Japanese program to equip and train the Islamic Iranian Armed Forces and the military arm of the Islamic Union. This operation is the culmination of his work. Yet, there are persistent rumors in the military attaché community in Tokyo of problems between him and the General Staff."
"What kind of problems?" Taylor asked sharply.
"Unknown. And the reports may be unsubstantiated. Other than that, we don't have much on him. Drinks Scotch, in moderation. Loves to play golf. But so does anybody who's anybody in Japan. Whenever he's in London, he goes to the theater."
"Whore around?"
Merry shook his head. "Nothing the Brits thought worth mentioning."
"Merry," Taylor said, careful to maintain a tone of relative nonchalance, "did you happen to pick up anything else about his service in Africa? Was he… an active participant?"
"Sir, I don't know. All we have on that is the ribbon on his chest. He could have received that for sitting in Capetown."
"Or… for any number of things."
"Yes, sir."
It didn't matter, Taylor told himself. He had the man now. General Noburu Kabata. Who flew around the world to dress up in another man's heritage. Whose preferred drink was Scotch. Who encouraged his son to break with tradition in a land where tradition still mattered. "Reputation as an Anglophile," as Merry put it. But the chosen mask was unimportant. Taylor recognized the type. If not an Anglophile, then a Francophile, or Germanophile. It did not matter. Anything to get out from under the burden pressing down on him since birth. Anything, in order to be anyone other than the man he had been condemned to be.
I can beat him, Taylor insisted to himself, hoping it was true.
He looked at Meredith, who was waiting for any further questions. The assembled officers shifted and rustled, and Taylor knew that they were cold and anxious to return to their own subordinates, to solve the inevitable last-minute problems. And the briefing had only begun. Well, he would not waste too much of their time.
"You know, Merry," Taylor began. The small noises ceased as the collected officers leaned to hear the commander's words. "There's just one thing I can't for the life of me understand. It nags at me. I know the Japanese have
a reputation as being hard sonsofbitches. But I just don t get the chemicals. What's the point? What is it in this bastard that makes him do such a thing? With his goddamned English suits and his golf clubs."
Merry touched a control and the big screen went blank. At once, there seemed to be a greater silence in the room, a visual silence.
"Perhaps," the intelligence officer said, "it's another object lesson. Maybe the Japanese are making a point about absolute dominance."
Taylor considered it. He himself could not come up with a better answer. But it did not ring true for him. With all of the capabilities of Japanese technology, the chemicals were merely a crude display of barbarism. It was hard to imagine a payoff commensurate with the growing level of international revulsion.
"Colonel Taylor, sir," Heifetz said, "suppose that it is not the Japanese. Suppose that the Arabs and the Iranians are using the chemical weapons on their own. Perhaps this man cannot control them. They are, you know, unpredictable, unreasonable. And they have used such weapons before."
Taylor turned to consider Heifetz, turning his thoughts as well. That certainly would be one possible answer. He looked at this homeless soldier, who had lost so much. Heifetz's face sought to project a toughness beyond emotion: detachment, strength. And. to most men, Heifetz s efforts were successful. But, looking at the graying Israeli, Taylor saw only a man who had lost his family, his nation, his past, and his future. Of course Lucky Dave would blame it on the Arabs. He could not help himself. But. even if there was some logic to it, Taylor could not accept the proposition. There was simply no way the Japanese would have allowed their surrogates to run so far out of control so early in the game. The Japanese were not that stupid.
David Heifetz had all but lost his sense of wonder. Only the inconstancy of time still held the occasional power to make him marvel at life's possibilities, even if, for him. those possibilities lay buried in bygone years, in a country passed into history. The creation of calendars and clocks seemed to him a desperate, frightened attempt to make time behave, to disguise the unreasonable, unpredictable accelerations and periods of slow drift, the instants of wild inarticulate revelation, and the eternities of dusty routine. At times, he struck himself as the most cowardly sort imaginable, hiding from time's unmanageable currents on his little military island, forcing his slowly deteriorating body through the rituals of schedules so abundant in any army, bound by the excuse of duty to retreat at the approach of his black early morning dreams, to shock himself awake, to bind himself tightly into polished boots, and to plunge into the endless, numbing work that made an army go. And time would seem to grow docile as he deadened himself with late nights at the office, evaluating, planning, writing, correcting, laboring over range schedules, training ammunition allocations, school quotas, exercise plans and orders, SOPs, post police responsibilities, efficiency reports, natural disaster evacuation plans, mobilization plans, countless briefings, inspection programs — he was only sorry that there was not more, that the moment would inevitably come when he would have to extinguish the last light in the building and lock the door behind him, to return to his nearly bare quarters and the utter vacancy that passed for his personal life. He rarely neglected the ceremonies and self-denials required of a Jew, in hope that there might finally be some comfort there, but the words and gestures, each strict abstinence, remained futile. His God was no longer the remarkably human God of Israel, but a fierce, malevolent, relentless, and unforgiving God, not a God for the suffering, but a God from whom suffering flowed, a God who laughed at agony, then set his face in stone. His God was the primitive deity of the savage barely elevated from the beast, of dark ancient armies marching to bum the cities of light and hope, to massacre their inhabitants, to scour away all life.