Mortal Allies by Brian Haig

swooped down. Keith looked handsomer than ever in a superbly tailored worsted gray flannel suit, with a silk handkerchief stuck out of his coat pocket that perfectly matched his necktie. He looked like one of the models you see in all those catchy men’s fashion magazines Army guys don’t subscribe to. Our fashion world is prescribed in tedious detail by something called a regulation that doesn’t leave you the least bit curious about what lapel cuts or tie widths are in vogue this year.
    Katherine looked frantic. “We’ve got an appointment at the embassy in thirty minutes.”
    “Have fun,” I mumbled, whipping the paper back up in front of my face.
    She and Keith kept standing there, and I knew damn well what was going through Katherine’s mind. She wasn’t about to beg me to come along, but hey, she was way over her head on this.
    I wasn’t over my head. I was swimming in my own métier, as the saying has it. But I also wasn’t about to come along — unless, that is, she did beg me. I can be real churlish that way.
    She said, “Attila, I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to tag along.”
    “Uh-huh,” I murmured, hibernating behind my paper.
    “You know, this might be a fairly interesting session.”
    “Bet so,” I idly mumbled.
    “Come on, Attila. You coming?”
    “I haven’t done the crossword yet,” I remarked indifferently.
    Another moment passed. I heard Keith whisper something in her ear.
    “Attila,
please
come,” she said.
    “Hey, Moonbeam, my name’s not Attila,” I replied, pointing down at my nametag. Keith’s eyebrow shot up in the air at that one. He looked questionably at Katherine as though to say, Moonbeam? Then he smiled, because really, as monikers go, it fit.
    She ignored him and said, “Okay, Major . . . Major Drummond . . . Sean. Please come.”
    I put down my paper with an exaggerated sigh. “Be happy to. If you think I would be helpful, that is.” I looked up into her beautiful face and could see this was getting excruciatingly painful for her.
    Her big green eyes got narrow and pointy, and her cute little lips shrank. “It could be helpful,” she said, with no effort to disguise her resentment.
    “I’m sorry. Was that
could
be helpful? Or
would
be helpful?”
    “It, uh . . . it
would
be helpful. Okay?”
    I could tell I’d extracted about as much humility from her as I was likely to get. On this round, anyway.
    “And how were you planning to get to the embassy?” I asked.
    “I thought we’d take a taxi.”
    “Won’t work,” I told her.
    “And why not?”
    “Because we’d never get there. Just a minute.”
    I went to a phone by the hostess’s table. I dialed the operator and asked her to immediately put me through to the MP station. A desk sergeant with a brusque, uncompromising voice answered. I told him to connect me to the shift commander.
    An only slightly more reasonable voice came on the line. “Captain Bittlesby.”
    “Bittlesby, this is Major Drummond, co-counsel for Captain Whitehall.”
    “Yes sir.”
    “My other two co-counsels and I need to be transported and escorted to the American embassy. Immediately.”
    “Is this trip authorized?” he wearily asked.
    “Authorized by who?”
    “By Major General Conley, General Spears’s chief of staff.”
    “This just came up. There isn’t time for that.”
    Sounding a little too happy, he said, “Too bad, then. Without Conley’s signature, nobody leaves base.”
    I said, “Listen, Captain, we’ve got an appointment in twenty-eight minutes to meet with the acting ambassador. You could take that for authorization. Or, if you’d like, I’ll tell the ambassador, ‘Gee, I’m sorry, Captain Bittlesby says we can’t come.’ Then I’ll call the
New York Times
and tell ’em some captain named Bittlesby is trying to sabotage Whitehall’s defense.”
    The thing with the Army is that a little bit of the right kind of coercion goes a long way. Soldiers don’t like to get crossways with