His most persistent vision of Kinshasa remained the public coupling of a big man with a woman in a red silk mask. The two of them leaned up against a doorway in a garbage-strewn alley. With no change in rhythm, the man turned his head and eyed the passing stranger with the disinterested expression of a dog.
"Yes, sir," the old master sergeant had said to him, as he guided Taylor through the disinfectant showers at the Kinshasa airfield processing detachment, "you're looking a little the worse for wear. But we'll fix you up."
The hot jets of the shower felt as though they were barely reaching his skin through the accumulated filth. The master sergeant had placed all of Taylor's uniform remnants in a dangerous-waste container. He had wanted to dispose of the matted cavalry pennant, as well. But the sudden look in Taylor's face, perhaps touched with just a bit of jungle madness, perhaps a look like the one his face had worn in the instant before he killed the bandit and the bartender upriver, had persuaded the other man to provide Taylor a special bag and receipt form that promised the item would be sterilized and returned to him.
"I suppose it's one hell of a mess up-country," the master sergeant said in a voice loud enough to reach into the shower stall with Taylor.
Taylor found it too hard to talk just yet. But the NCO went on, perhaps sensing a need in the half-crazed officer who had just walked in out of the bush, or perhaps because he was the kind of NCO who simply liked to talk — about wars and women and life's infinite small annoyances. He seemed wonderfully familiar to Taylor, a cursing, grunting, eternally weary symbol of Home. Taylor wanted to respond with words of his own. But it was very hard. It was much easier just to let the disinfectant-laced water stream down over him.
"It's a hellhole, I'll tell you," the sergeant continued. "Captain, I was in Colombia, from ninety-seven to ninety-nine, and I deployed to Bolivia a couple of times. But I never seen a mess like this place. They ought to just give it back to the Indians."
"I… was in Colombia," Taylor said, testing his vocal cords.
"Yeah? With who? I was with the Seventh Infantry Division. You know, 'Too light to fight' and all. Jeez, what a clusterfuck."
"I was with the Sixty-fourth Aviation Brigade." Taylor's hands trembled helplessly as he struggled to manipulate the big bar of soap under the torrents of water.
"Oh, yeah. Them guys. Yeah. Maybe you gave me a lift sometime."
"I was flying gunships."
"You were lucky. I hate to tell you what it was like humping up them jungle mountains. Christ, how we used to curse you guys. If you don't mind me saying. The chopper jockeys would be lifting off again before our butts cleared the doors. Of course, that's nothing to what the Navy done when the shit hit the fan with the South Africans."
"What's that?"
"You didn't hear, sir? Yeah, well. I guess you were out in the woods. As soon as the casualties started piling up— especially, the RD victims — that old carrier battle group that was sitting off the coast just unassed the area. Protecting and preserving the force, they called it. What it amounted to was that they weren't about to load any sick grunts onto their precious boats. But, I mean, what the hell? The only reason the Air Force is still flying us out is because of a presidential order. Ain't that a kick in the ass? Everybody was just ready to let Joe Snuffy die like a dog in a ditch. I guess they figured there weren't going to be any medals and promotions out of this one."
"You're kidding. How the hell did they expect us to evacuate?"
The master sergeant laughed, and the sound of it echoed through the concrete shelter. "The Air Force weenies… wanted us to book charter flights. They said it would be more cost effective. Of course, I guess they were a little gun-shy after losing twenty billion dollars worth of B-2s to a handful of cowboys. Like the Navy guys said, you got to protect and preserve the force."
Consciously steadying his hand, Taylor turned off the flow of water. As he stepped out of the narrow booth, rubbing himself hard with the towel, trying to wipe away the past four months in their entirety, the master sergeant looked him up and down and shook his head.
"Looks like you could use a good meal, Captain."
Taylor left for the Azores quarantine site on an evac run for those not yet ill with RD. Sitting in an ill-fitting special-issue uniform, with the freshly sterilized cavalry guidon in his breast pocket, he felt the greatest relief of his life as the shrieking Air Force plane lifted away from the African continent. He scanned old copies of Stars and Stripes, but even the relentlessly negative news articles could not fully suppress his elation.
In the poorly lit belly of the transport, he learned that the nuclear strike on Pretoria had been sufficient to force a South African withdrawal. The South Africans had overplayed their hand, after all. But the U.S. had lost far more than it gained. The world condemned the U.S. action. There was no sympathy, even from the nation's closest allies. Instead, the event gave furious impetus to the movement to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The Japanese used the strike as a pretext to launch a trade war of unprecedented scale. Over the decades, the Japanese had slowly forced the United States and even the European Union out of key markets, such as electronics and high-grade machine tools, and now they announced that they would no longer trade with any nation that continued to trade with the United States. It was, Tokyo said, a moral issue. The Japanese did allow that they would continue to sell to the United States, since a total embargo would cause excessive hardship for innocent people…
The American government found itself helpless. There were no made-in-the-U.S. A. replacements for many of the items that made a neotechnological society function, and without Japanese spare parts, large sectors of the U.S. economy would have ground to a halt within weeks. Warfare suddenly had parameters that the military could not penetrate with radar-evading bombers or vast fleets. Even the military machine itself had come to rely on crucial components originally designed in the U.S.A. but improved and produced more efficiently in Japan.
The news media blustered about an economic Pearl Harbor, running their newspapers on state-of-the-art presses built in Yokohama, or broadcasting their commentaries over Japanese hardware to high-definition television sets made by Panasonic, Toshiba, and Hitachi. There seemed little hope for a second Battle of Midway in the near future. Certainly, even a strategic military response was out of the question, not only due to the debacle suffered by U.S. arms in Africa and the anti-U.S. sentiment prevailing worldwide, but also because the Japanese home islands' Space and Atmospheric Defense Complex — SAD-C — was far more sophisticated than were the partially deployed U.S. space defenses, which had both inspired and provided the initial technology for the Japanese effort.