Chapter 6
Maddox was three feet behind me, and his face had gone the color of the inside of an oyster.
His eyes went from me to Varga to Sterns and back, and I watched with a feeling I am not proud of and will not pretend was entirely sorrow.
The exact moment the morning rearranged itself behind his eyes.
The garment bag. The case. No badge. The name on the manifest he could not place.
The driver he had sent to the cars.
It all landed on him at once.
His hand started to come up toward the brim of his cover in an instinctive salute, then stopped halfway because he did not know in that moment what I was, only that I was not what he had decided.
A man who has guessed that wrong once is afraid to guess again.
The lane went silent except for the idling engines.
Into that silence walked one more person, a sergeant major in the command’s uniform, who had come out behind Maddox. He was a solid man of about my own age, with a face I half recognized and could not place.
He crossed the apron at a walk that turned into something faster. He stopped a respectful distance from me and came to attention.
When he spoke, he spoke to General Sterns, but he was looking at me.
“Sir,” he said, “Sergeant Major Felix Ortega. I was a specialist on the relief element that went in for them in 2012. I was on the second bird.”
His voice was rough.
“Everything the general just said is in the record. I have read it. The whole command should have read it.”
He looked at me, and recognition caught up to memory.
“Ma’am, I didn’t know it was you they were bringing in today. I’d have been at that curb at 0600.”
I had not seen Felix Ortega in fourteen years either. He had been a kid on a helicopter in the worst light of my life.
He was a sergeant major now.
The morning was full of people who had been young the last time I saw them and had gone on and become themselves while I stood still at the curb of a grief I would not put down.
The size of that hit me all at once, standing there with a wand in my hand and a general’s salute still warm in the air.
“Sergeant Major,” I said, “it’s good to see you upright.”
“It’s good to be upright, ma’am,” he said.
His mouth did something that was trying to be a smile and not quite making it.
I understood that he had carried that morning too, in his own way. There were probably more of us than I had ever let myself count, people walking around inside their own lives with that same morning folded up in a breast pocket.
I had spent fourteen years thinking I carried it alone, because carrying it alone was a way of staying close to the man I had lost.
Sterns let the silence sit for one more moment, and then he gathered the morning back up with a few quiet words, the way a senior officer can.
He greeted his guest properly. He had Varga’s delegation walked inside out of the heat. As the choreography reassembled itself around us, off script but recovering, he put one hand lightly on my shoulder and steered me a half step aside.
“Look, just for me, Colonel,” he said, “when the delegation is settled, you and I are going to have a conversation. I have read your file. I read it last week. I am ashamed of the last ten minutes. They did not happen on my orders, and I am going to make them right.”
He looked at the wand in my hand.
“May I?”
He took it from me gently and handed it to a staff officer without looking at the man.
That small thing, a four-star general taking a parking wand out of my hand so I would not have to keep holding it, did more to me than the salute had.
The morning that was supposed to be Colonel Maddox’s flawless ceremony became very quickly and very quietly something else.
The delegation went inside, and the visit went on, because visits always go on. The machinery of two militaries being polite does not stop for one man’s catastrophe at a curb.
But the air in the building had changed.
I walked in behind the principals, and the staff officers who had filed past me an hour before could not meet my eyes. The young captain who had handed me the clipboard had gone a deep red and kept trying to find a moment to say something to me and not finding one.
I let him not find one.
His suffering was already doing the work. I did not need to add to it.
About forty minutes later, while the command brief ran in the main conference room, an aide found me in the corridor and walked me to a small side room off the lobby.
General Sterns came in a minute after and shut the door. It was just the two of us and an aide standing quietly in the corner.
Sterns did not sit.
He stood and looked at me for a moment, then said the thing I think he had come in to say.
“I want to relieve him,” he said. “Maddox. I want him gone by lunch. I watched a foreign deputy chief of defense salute one of my officers in my own parking lot, an officer my chief of protocol had sent to stand with the drivers without so much as looking at her identification.”
He paused, and his jaw moved once.
May you like
“I have rarely in my career wanted to end a man’s morning the way I want to end his right now. So I am asking you because it was done to you and not to me, and because I have read what you did in 2012 and I think you have earned the right to be asked. Say the word, Colonel, and he is finished by the time the lunch plates come out.”
He gave me the smallest, hardest smile.
