He nodded.

“Why didn’t you?”

“It wouldn’t have helped. It might have attracted attention. Anyway, he was… too malleable. Too yielding. Do you understand, Mr. Murdoch?”

“I know what you mean. I meet people. People I used to know, even. They’re real nice. Too nice. It’s scary, but you can’t hate ’em for it. Much less shoot ’em. Be like killing a rabbit with a pipe wrench.”

Tyler nodded.

Murdoch extracted two cans of Coors from a cooler in the back of the vehicle. He offered one to Tyler, who popped the tab and listened to the hiss.

“No,” Murdoch said, “they’re not the enemy. Those things on the road, on the other hand…”

“Helpers,” Colonel Tyler said.

“Uh-huh. Now, to me, they look like the enemy.”

“I share your thought,” Tyler said.

“You thought about what to do about it?”

“Obviously. But why don’t you give me your perspective first.”

“Well… there’s all this technology lying around, but most of it you can’t manage if you’re just one person—or just two. Might be fun zooming over the treetops with an A-10 and twelve-hundred rounds of those depleted uranium-tipped slugs, say. But, shit, I’m no pilot. Sir, are you?”

“About a hundred hours in a Piper Cub.”

“We couldn’t even preflight an A-10. So we’re looking at portable ground weapons. Not a tank or a self-propelled Howitzer or anything sluggish like that. I mean, we don’t know for sure what we’re up against. So, something lean. A Dragon, an AT-4. Okay, we can get lots of those. The whole world’s an armory, right? And the doors are wide open. But for a first encounter, I’m thinking power and mobility. I’m thinking shoot and scoot.”

“The Hummer,” Tyler interpreted.

“The Hummer, and more specifically that TOW on the roof. The way I see it, we encounter a Helper on the open road, we can bust it and break away before their cavalry arrives.”

Tyler sipped his beer and pretended to be thinking it over.

“Mr. Murdoch, we don’t know what defenses those things might possess.”

“I don’t think we can find out except by shooting at ’em.”

“Might be dangerous.”

Murdoch heard something in Tyler’s voice, some unsuccessfully suppressed note of mischief. He smiled. “Sir, it might indeed. It’s a pretty day for shooting, though, isn’t it?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You have to teach me how to operate this TOW.” Tyler glanced up at a sky the color of blue chalk. “It’s a pretty day for some live-fire exercises, too.”

Murdoch wasn’t pleased with this. “I’d hoped to operate the TOW myself—you know—when it comes time.”

“Rank has its privileges, Mr. Murdoch. I expect we’ll both get a chance.”

“Yes, sir,” Murdoch said.

They came to know each other that first week they were together on the live-fire range at Quantico, Murdoch teaching him the TOW and some smaller tank-killers. Tyler guessed you could say they were friends, the barrier of command fractured a little by their odd situation. Tyler shared some secrets, as friends do. But there were secrets he simply couldn’t share, had never shared with anyone—such as the history of his madness.

“Madness,” too strong a word, but Tyler used it to remind himself that it was not merely unhappiness, not merely self-pity, it was a darker and more powerful presence that from time to time settled upon him.

Ever since Sissy died.

These memories came back at night.

Key events during his twelfth year: He achieved a B+ average at school, scored well above the norm on a Stanford-Binet intelligence test administered by the school board, and fainted twice, once in gym, once in homeroom. The school nurse asked him what he usually ate for breakfast and dinner, and he answered, both times, “Frosted Flakes.” He liked the picture of the tiger on the box. He did most of the shopping himself. He never bought vegetables because he wasn’t sure how: you put them in these plastic bags, you weighed them… it was confusing; he worried he might spend more than the three or four dollars Sissy let him carry to the store.

As for canned vegetables—he had tried that once. Canned peas, which came out pale green and wrinkly, not much like the picture on the label. Sissy said they tasted like rat poison. Had he ever watched a poisoned rat die? Sissy had. Sissy described the event. “You want to do that to me?”

Tyler thought he’d better stick to Frosted Flakes.

The nurse and his homeroom teacher conferred, which led to a visit from a social worker, which led, after no little trauma, to Tyler’s installation in a foster home and Sissy’s forcible remittance to a white brick building out of town, where she died six months later of “an accident while bathing.” Tyler had seen the guards who worked at this institution: They were barrel-chested, stupid, and permanently pissed off. Sissy used to spit at them. So Tyler was suspicious when they told him the “accident” part. But Sissy was dead—that was a fact.

He never found out what happened to the old row house or Sissy’s remittance money. He didn’t want to have anything to do with either one. He was glad Sissy was gone. Life was better without Sissy.

Still, when he overheard a social worker say the same thing—that he would be better off without Sissy— Tyler tried to kill the woman with the sharp end of a blue Bic pen.

He didn’t do much more than scratch her face, though he privately hoped the ink had dyed the skin beneath the wound, a permanent tattoo, a reminder that such calculations were not hers to make.

The act propelled him out of his foster home and into a grim institution (perhaps not unlike the white brick building in which Sissy had died spitting at her captors) in which Tyler was kicked, assaulted, humiliated, sometimes brutalized, at best ignored. He was rescued from this limbo when a legal inquiry into Sissy’s holdings discovered a living relative who was willing to take custody of the boy.

Tyler never actually met this man, who preferred to remain safely distant; he was a retired lawyer, Tyler understood, who paid his way into a military boarding school of some repute. The boy was bright; everyone admitted that. Sullen sometimes. Given to fantasy. A loner. But smart as a whip.

He enlisted in the Army with good prospects, earned his lieutenant’s bars, earned a bachelor’s degree at the government’s expense, faced a bright future as a commissioned officer.

He did carry a few black marks on his record. During basic infantry training, he had come close to killing another man, a memory that still troubled him. It was an impulse. There was no other word to describe it. One moment he was practicing a takedown; the next he was strangling the man. It was nobody in particular. It happened to be a stringbean named Delgado, who was actually a friend of his, more or less. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the sudden and overwhelming need to do harm, to carve his name on a stranger’s life as painfully as strangers had carved their names on his. Plus it gave him an erection.

Three other men had dragged him off Delgado, who gagged and vomited. No permanent damage had been done, however, and in view of Tyler’s otherwise excellent record, the event was written off as an anomaly. It was a pattern he would come to recognize. The phrase in light of this soldiers otherwise commendable performance decorated a whole drawer of complaints. Not insubordination—never that. Drunkenness, fistfights, slovenly dress, once a speed run through Saigon with the military police behind him. But only at certain intervals, certain dark passages in his life, certain times when he heard Sissy’s voice too often in his head—that is, only during his madnesses.

It had slowed his rise from the ranks. When you reach a certain point, Tyler discovered, your private life begins to matter. You start being seen at parties with embassy personnel, in a decorative role, offering dances to the wives of ambassadors and the daughters of diplomats; consorting with people who want you to be their little brother in uniform, an American Centurion with a cute little pixie wife and maybe a freckled three-year-old in military housing somewhere. They didn’t want you trafficking, for instance, with Asian prostitutes, unless you were very discreet, and they didn’t look kindly on the rumor that you’d been seen in a different red-light district altogether, where the traffic leaned toward young Asian boys.