The Enemy

The rest area was the same as on most American interstates I had seen. The northbound highway and the southbound highway eased apart to put a long fat bulge into the median. The buildings were shared by both sets of travelers. Therefore they had two fronts and no backs. They were built of brick and had dormant flower beds and leafless trees all around them. There were gas pumps. There were angled parking slots. Right then the place seemed to be halfway between quiet and busy. It was the end of the holidays. Families were struggling home, ready for school, ready for work. The parking slots were maybe one-third filled with cars. Their distribution was interesting. People had grabbed the first parking spot they saw rather than chancing something farther on, even though that might have put them ultimately a little closer to the food and the bathrooms. Maybe it was human nature. Some kind of insecurity.

There was a small semicircular plaza at the facility’s main entrance. I could see bright neon signs inside at the food stations. Outside, there were six trash cans all fairly close to the doors. There were plenty of people around, looking in, looking out.

“Too public,” Summer said. “This is going nowhere.”

I nodded again. “I’d forget it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for Mrs. Kramer.”

“Carbone is more important. We should prioritize.”

“That feels like we’re giving up.”

We went north out of the rest area and Summer did her off-roading thing across the median again and turned south. I got as comfortable as it was possible to get in a military vehicle and settled in for the ride back. Darkness unspooled on my left. There was a vague sunset in the West, to my right. The road looked damp. Summer didn’t seem very worried about the possibility of ice.

I did nothing for the first twenty minutes. Then I switched the dome light on and searched Kramer’s briefcase, thoroughly. I didn’t expect to find anything, and I wasn’t proved wrong. His passport was a standard item, seven years old. He looked a little better in the picture than he had dead in the motel, but not much. He had plenty of stamps in and out of Germany and Belgium. The future battlefield and NATO HQ, respectively. He hadn’t been anywhere else. He was a true specialist. For at least seven years he had concentrated exclusively on the world’s last great tank arena and its command structure.

The plane tickets were exactly what Garber had said they should be. Frankfurt to Dulles, and Washington National to Los Angeles, both round-trip. They were all coach class and government rate, booked three days before the first departure date.

The itinerary matched the details on the plane tickets exactly. There were seat assignments. It seemed like Kramer preferred the aisle. Maybe his age was affecting his bladder. There was a reservation for a single room in Fort Irwin’s Visiting Officers’ Quarters, which he had never reached.

His wallet contained thirty-seven American dollars and sixty-seven German marks, all in mixed small bills. The Amex card was the basic green item, due to expire in a year and a half. He had carried one since 1964, according to the Member Since rubric. I figured that was pretty early for an army officer. Back then most got by with cash and military scrip. Kramer must have been a sophisticated guy, financially.

There was a Virginia driver’s license. He had been using Green Valley as his permanent address, even though he avoided spending time there. There was a standard military ID card. There was a photograph of Mrs. Kramer, behind a plastic window. It showed a much younger version of the woman I had seen dead on her hallway floor. It was at least twenty years old. She had been pretty back then. She had long auburn hair that showed up a little orange from the way the photograph had faded with age.

There was nothing else in the wallet. No receipts, no restaurant checks, no Amex carbons, no phone numbers, no scraps of paper. I wasn’t surprised. Generals are often neat, organized people. They need fighting talent, but they need bureaucratic talent too. I guessed Kramer’s office and desk and quarters would be the same as his wallet. They would contain everything he needed and nothing he didn’t.

The hardcover book was an academic monograph from a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany’s last grand offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer himself are eventually turned loose. I wasn’t surprised by his choice of reading material. Some small part of him must have feared the closest he would ever get to truly cataclysmic action was reading about the hundreds of Tigers and Panthers and T-34s whirling and roaring through the choking summer dust all those years ago.