“Very clever,” I said. “Did it work?”
“Beyond his wildest expectations. The thief already had several open cans of gasoline about himself when he turned that particular cap. The camera went off, but the electronic impulse of the flashbulb ignited the gasoline fumes in the air, and the explosion demolished the thief, seven vehicles and the Motor Pool office.”
“Urn,” I said.
“Absolutely put a stop to pilfering on that base,” he said, and nodded with remembered satisfaction.
“I can see where it would,” I said.
“There was nothing left of the thief, of course,” he said. “We had to find him by a process of elimination, scanning the Morning Reports for missing men until we’d narrowed it down to just one possibility. Then we got some sheep parts from the mess hall, put them in a plastic bag, and shipped them home to the fellow’s parents. Said he died falling out of a jeep.”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“That’s the standard explanation, of course, for all noncombatant Army deaths. Died falling out of a jeep.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve seen that in newspaper reports.”
“The odd thing is,” he said, “I once knew a fellow who did die from falling out of a jeep.”
“Oh?”
“He was having intercourse with a nurse at the time,” he said. “At a given moment she lunged upward so vigorously she flipped him completely out of the jeep.”
“Was it moving?”
“Hm? Oh, the jeep. No, he landed on a mine.”
“Urn,” I said.
“Speaking of landing on mines,” he said, “that reminds me of another funny story.” And he proceeded to tell it. Soon our food came, and so did the wine, but Eddie kept on telling me his reminiscences. Friends of his had fallen under tanks, walked into airplane propellers, inadvertently bumped their elbows against the firing mechanism of thousand-pound bombs and walked backwards off the flight deck of an aircraft carrier while backing up to take a group photograph. Other friends had misread the control directions on a robot tank and driven it through a Pennsylvania town’s two hundredth anniversary celebration square dance, had fired a bazooka while it was facing the wrong way, had massacred a USO Gilbert and Sullivan troop rehearsing “The Mikado” under the mistaken impression they were peaceful Vietnamese villagers, and had ordered a nearby enlisted man to look in that mortar and see why the shell hadn’t come out.
It began after a while to seem as though Eddie’s military career had been an endless red-black vista of explosions, fires and crumpling destruction, all intermixed with hoarse cries, anonymous thuds and terminal screams. Eddie recounted these disasters in his normal bloodless style, with touches of that dry avuncular humor he’d displayed during our hour at the bar. I managed to eat very little of my veal parmigiana-it kept looking like a body fragment-but became increasingly sober nonetheless. A brandy later with coffee, accompanied by a Korean War story about a friend of Eddie’s trapped in a box canyon for nine days by a combination of a blizzard and a North Korean offensive, who kept himself alive by sawing off his own wounded leg and eating steaks from it, but who later died in Honolulu from gangrene of the stomach, didn’t help much.
Or maybe it did, in a way. By the time we left the Officer’s Club, shortly before nine o’clock, I was numb with horror, but the subject of my numbness had been transferred from the laser larceny to Eddie’s memoirs. I sup pose I was in the best possible frame of mind for the events to follow: cold sober, and actively anxious to be distracted, even if that distraction had to be the commission of a felony.
The streets of the camp were well illuminated, but there was very little traffic. Eddie and I strolled along, he pausing at last in his recital to puff a cigar in the crisp night air and to take an obvious sensual pleasure from his surroundings; he was like the captain of a great steamship out for a promenade around the deck. This was his environment, well-understood and well-loved. All it lacked to make it really homey for him, I thought, was a few burned bodies and the distant rattle of machine-gun fire.
After three or four blocks we moved out of the housing and administrative area clustered in the vicinity of the main gate. From here on sprawled the storage section, starting with great hulking curved quonset huts, looking like headless armadillos. The ordinary streetlights were replaced here by floodlights at the corners of the buildings, and sentries stood guard at many of the doorways.
Judiciously Eddie said, “Wouldn’t like an explosion around this area.”
I looked at him, apprehensive. “Why’s that?”
He motioned to the quonset huts around us. “Some cyanide compounds,” he said. “Other poison gases, some defoliants, a few sterilizing agents. Enough chemical weaponry right here to strip the Earth naked.”
“Oh,” I said, and for a while after that I found it very difficult not to walk on tiptoe.
19
THE BUILDING WE WANTED was just beyond the cylinders full of plague germs. “There it is,” Eddie said. “The structure on the right.”
“Uh huh,” I said, and stopped scratching to look. Ever since he’d told me about the plague germs, I’d been itching all over. Also my lungs felt wrinkled.
The structure on the right was a one-story version of the basic building, with fewer windows than normal. A rifle-bearing sentry marched back and forth in front of the entry door. That is, he marched back and forth the instant he saw the two of us, a Captain and a Lieutenant, approaching his post; before then he’d been more mooching than marching. And now, as we neared him, he came smartly to a halt, did a right face toward us, snappily converted from right shoulder arms to port arms, and announced in a very young voice, “Who goes there?”
“Captain Robinson,” Eddie told him. “At ease, soldier.” The sentry’s body slackened a bit, but the rifle remained more or less at port arms while Eddie fished out the documents Bob Dombey had forged for him. I spent the time studying the sentry; did they really let a boy like this have bullets for that gun?
“Here you are, soldier.”
The boy wouldn’t take the papers. He stuck his head forward over his clutched rifle and read them as Eddie held them up in front of him. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Very good, sir. You want to enter?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t have a key,” he said doubtfully.
“I have,” Eddie assured him. A week ago Eddie had returned from the base with various wax impressions, and Phil had arranged to have keys made for him in the prison machine shop. Now, Eddie took out a ring of keys, selected one, and used it with casual confidence to open the door. “Return to your post, soldier,” he said, not harshly, and the two of us entered the building, pausing only for Eddie to hit the light switch beside the door, turning on a double row of fluorescent lights extending all the way down to the other end of the building.
There were no interior partitions. It was almost exactly like my old basic training barracks, a long rectangular room with square wooden pillars at intervals to support the roof. The only difference was that my barracks had been lined with windows all the way around, while this structure only sported a pair of windows flanking the main entrance and three more windows spaced along each side. No windows, so far as I could see, were in the rear wall.
There was no furniture in the building, just cartons stacked up so as to make aisles. Most of the stacks were no more than waist-high, but here and there one loomed as high as my head. Reading the stencilled notations on various cartons I learned that I was standing among machine guns, mortar shells, night sights, hand grenades . . .
“Ah,” Eddie said. “Here they are. Find an empty carton, Lieutenant, there ought to be one around here somewhere.”
That was the second time he’d done that. The first, back in the Officer’s Club dining room, I’d put down to excess caution. But who could overhear us this time? Looking toward the front windows I saw the sentry marching smartly back and forth out there, with the door closed between us and him; surely there was no way he could hear anything being said in here.