No questions, except to verify their needs. Marty had Jefferson and Ingram installed in the clinic, along with a couple of the Twenty.
They began setting up the Portobello phase from la Florida. Assuming the local phones weren’t secure, they had a scrambled military line bounced off a satellite and routed through General Roser.
It was easy enough to get Julian assigned to Building 31 as a kind of middle-management trainee, since he was no longer a factor in the company’s strategic plans. But the other part of it—a request to extend his platoon’s time in the soldierboys an additional week—was turned down at the battalion level, with the terse explanation that the “boys” had already gone through too much stress the past couple of cycles.
That was true enough. They had had three weeks, unjacked, to dwell on the Liberia disaster, and some had not been in good soldierly shape when they came back. Then there was the new stress of retraining with Eileen Zakim, Julian’s replacement. For nine days they would be confined to Portobello—“Pedroville”—doing the same maneuvers over and over, until their performance with Eileen was close enough to what it had been with Julian.
(It would turn out that Eileen did have one pleasant surprise. She had expected resentment, that the new platoon leader had come from outside, rather than being promoted from the ranks. It was quite the opposite: they all had known Julian’s job intimately, and none of them wanted it.)
It was fortunate, but not exactly unusual, that the colonel who brusquely turned down the extension request had himself a request for change of assignment in the works. Many of the officers in Building 31 would rather be assigned someplace with more action, or with less; this colonel suddenly had orders delivered that sent him to a relief compound in Botswana, a totally pacified place where the Alliance presence was considered a godsend.
The colonel who replaced him came from Washington, from General Stanton Roser’s Office of Force Management and Personnel. After he’d settled in for a few days, reviewing his predecessor’s policies and actions, he quietly reversed the one affecting Julian’s old platoon. They would stay jacked until 25 July, as part of a long-standing OFMP study. On the 25th, they’d be brought in for testing and evaluation.
Brought in to Building 31.
Roser’s OFMP couldn’t directly affect what went on in the huge Canal Zone POW camp; that was managed by a short company from Army Intelligence, which had a platoon of soldierboys attached to it.
The challenge was somehow to have all the POWs jacked together for two weeks without any of the soldierboys or Intelligence officers, one of whom was also jacked, eavesdropping.
To this end they conjured up a colonelcy for Harold McLaughlin, the only one of the Twenty who had both army experience and fluency in Spanish. He had orders cut to go to the Zone to monitor an experiment in extended “pacification” of the POWs. His uniforms and papers were waiting for him in Guadalajara.
One night in Texas, Marty had called all the Saturday Night Special people and asked, in an enigmatic and guarded way, whether they would like to come down to Guadalajara, to share some vacation time with him and Julian and Blaze: “Everyone has been under so much stress.” It was partly to benefit from their varied and objective viewpoints, but also to get them across the border before the wrong people showed up asking questions. All of them but Belda said they were able to come; even Ray, who had just spent a couple of weeks in Guadalajara, having a few decades’ worth of fat vacuumed out of his body.
So who should be first to show up at la Florida but Belda, after all, hobbling in with a cane and an overloaded human porter. Marty was in the entrance hall, and for a moment just stared.
“I thought it over and decided to take the train down. Convince me it wasn’t a big mistake.” She nodded at the porter. “Tell this nice boy where to put my things.”
“Uh . . . habitación dieciocho. Room 18. Up the stairs. You speak English?”
“Enough,” he said, and staggered up the stairs with the four bags.
“I know Asher’s coming in this afternoon,” she said. It was not quite twelve. “What about the others? I thought I might rest until the festivities begin.”
“Good. Good idea. Everyone should be in by six or seven. We have a buffet set up for eight.”