Conduct Unbecoming

By the time they filed back into the main briefing room for the 1500 reconvene the shape of the operation was clear in her mind. Both objectives were executable simultaneously if the forward position held and the communication architecture stayed up. If either failed the sequencing became a field judgment call.

Her call.

She found a seat and opened her notebook to a clean page.

Across the aisle Staff Sergeant Miller was already seated, notebook open, a pen moving across the page as he spoke quietly to one of the other soldiers. A positioning diagram taking shape from the angle of his marks. He was working the same problem she was, from the other side of it.

She looked back at the projection screen.

The colonel returned to the front at 1500 exactly.

"All right," he said. "Let's talk about how your two elements are going to function together."

________________

The flight to Bucharest was commercial, civilian clothes, nothing that announced what any of them were. Kayleigh flew alone on a routing through Vienna, a carry-on and a laptop bag and a legend that described her as a technology consultant. She read a novel for two hours and slept for one and did not think about the operation or about Graham or about anything in particular.

She had been doing that - not thinking - for three days with moderate success.

The night before departure he had come to bed at eleven and reached for her in the dark. She had turned toward him with something that felt enough like desire that she hadn't examined it too closely.

His hands on her still felt the same, and she had closed her eyes, kissed him back and been present in her body and absent everywhere else, and afterward he had fallen asleep with his arm across her and she had lain in the dark, staring at the ceiling, feeling as if she had just witnessed someone else doing something inexplicable.

It was far from the first time since her discovery and it had disturbed her that she had wanted it and been repulsed by it at the same time.

She was still not sure what that meant about her. She thought of Diane: maybe she was a 'cold bitch' too.

In the end, she had decided to take the weeks in the field as the opportunity to step away that it was. The fact it provided her husband even more opportunity to spend his nights with the tall slim blonde - without having to lie to his unsuspecting wife - didn't escape her.

But she decided to not think of that as well.

The taxi from the airport took forty minutes. The hotel was a mid-range business property in a quiet street in Sector 1, designed to cater to traveling salesmen and minor consultants and ask no questions about late arrivals. She paid the driver in the money she had exchanged at the airport and pulled her carry-on through the entrance.

The revolving door delivered her into the lobby at the same moment as a man in civilian clothes came through the street door to her left.

She recognized him without looking directly at him. He had a bag over one shoulder and three days of growth on his jaw, which meant he had stopped shaving immediately on receiving his orders.

She did not acknowledge him. She went to the front desk and checked in under her legend name and took her key card and went to the elevator without looking back.

Her room was on the fourth floor. Small, clean, a window overlooking the street below. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her phone. No messages. She showered and ordered room service and ate at the small desk by the window and went to sleep at 2200.

In the morning the city was gray and cold and the street below was moving with ordinary Bucharest Tuesday traffic. She dressed, went down for breakfast, sat alone with coffee and bread and cheese and did not make eye contact with anyone she recognized, of whom there were three in the dining room doing the same thing she was doing.

The other personnel were scattered in two other hotels within the same area. She did not know which ones.

Intelligence reports had suggested eyes at airports and military installations around the mission area - Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Bucharest - hence the staggered insertion of assets via multiple routes over the last two days.

The coordination meeting was at a light industrial property on the western edge of the city - a commercial unit accessed from a side street, unremarkable from the outside, the inside stripped to bare walls and folding tables and a secure communications setup that two technicians were still calibrating when the element began filtering in at 0900.

They came in ones and twos over thirty minutes. Fourteen people in civilian clothes assembling in a cold room that smelled of concrete and electronics. Greetings were exchanged in the form of polite nods. They took positions around the room and waited.

The briefer was the dark suited man from the initial meeting in Ramstein. Plain faced and smooth voiced, wearing a plain sweater and jeans.

"The contact is moving," he said without preamble. "Ahead of the window we gave you. He has assessed his exposure risk as elevated and moved his timeline forward by seventy-two hours. That means your deployment to the forward position is moving up." He looked around the room. "You leave in twelve hours."

The room absorbed that.

"Asset location is confirmed. The hostile technical element is on the ground and moving toward it but they are not there yet. You have a window." He looked at Kayleigh without singling her out. "The destruction protocol needs to execute before they detect your presence at the forward position. After that the window closes."

He covered the updated contact route, the revised extraction timeline, the communication architecture changes that the accelerated schedule required. He spoke for twenty-two minutes. He took eight questions. Then he said, "Twelve hours. Be ready," and left the room.

The element began to reorganize itself for departure. Kayleigh moved to the corner with Kenley and Dominguez and went through the revised timeline against her equipment checklist, making the adjustments the accelerated schedule required. Around them the Army personnel were doing the same thing in low voices.

She was standing slightly behind and to the right of the main Army cluster, Kenley beside her, when she saw Staff Sergeant Nathan Miller take his phone out from his pocket and look at the screen.

He had it on silent. She could see from the angle that it was a call coming in - the screen lit up and the name and contact photograph filled it before he pressed the side button and slid it back into his pocket.

The angle, the distance and the two seconds it took for him to end the call were enough.

Kayleigh stopped moving.

She stood with her pen above her checklist and did not write anything. Beside her Kenley was saying something about the revised communication windows and she heard the words without processing them. She watched Miller return his attention to whatever Haskell was saying.

His face had not changed.

She looked back at her checklist.

"Ma'am?" Kenley said.

"Revised window," she said. "Eighteen hours from forward position arrival. We adjust the primary protocol sequence accordingly. Walk me through the setup again."

Kenley nodded and walked her through it. She listened and asked the right questions and made the right notes and when they were done she capped her pen and put the checklist in her bag. She did not look across the room.

But she got involved when both Army and Air Force teams met to clarify any outstanding questions and address any concerns. There was the obligatory inter-service ribbing but nothing beyond that.

They left the coordination site in pairs and small groups over twenty minutes, staggered, the way they had arrived. She left with Dominguez and walked two blocks before boarding the bus back toward Sector 1.

The bus ran on a route that served three stops in the area where the element was quartered. She had not planned to be on the same bus with anyone. The stop was simply the nearest one.

He was already on it when she boarded, seated on the left side three rows from the front, a bag on his knee, his eyes on the window. She moved down the aisle and took a seat on the right side, two rows behind him.

The bus moved through afternoon Bucharest traffic, stopping and starting, the light outside already going flat in the late afternoon. She looked at the back of his head. He turned to look out the window and she looked away.

Graham had sent a message, arriving through a convoluted encrypted channel. She followed protocol, and typed out that she had gotten in safe with no mention of where she was.

When she looked up again, her eyes met the Staff Sergeant's in the reflection of the glass. She held his steady, unsettling gaze for a long moment before she looked away again.

The bus slowed for their stop. She stood and moved down the aisle toward the front door. So did he, ahead of her. They stepped out after each other, not saying a word.

The hotel entrance was a revolving door about fifty meters from the stop and she walked toward it with him in front of her by three paces.

The revolving door could take more than one person at a time and she quickened her steps so they entered the panel at the same time.

She spoke when he turned a questioning look at her, not looking at him, her voice low and level.

"Lobby. By the ice machine. 2300."

The door kept rotating and delivered them both into the warmth of the lobby. She continued on directly to the elevators without looking back.

________________

At 2252 Nathan was sitting on the edge of his bed, looking at his feet. He had been there for six minutes, thinking, wondering.

The Air Force Captain had impressed him at the briefing - her questions during the clarification session had been good and she had paid attention to others' questions and listened to the answers, which not everyone did.

Then she had met his eyes in the window glass in the bus and held his gaze long enough to let him know it was deliberate. Then had come the revolving door and the hissing out of a time and place.

She had struck him as too competent and composed to risk any part of the mission.

If what she wanted was an illicit liaison - between an officer and an enlisted man - she would have given him her room number. If that had been the case, he would have been asleep already, and he would pretend he hadn't heard her when he saw her again.

As it was, he had no idea what she wanted.

He considered not going - disobeying. She certainly outranked him, but the operational protocols were clear and whatever this was, it existed outside them.

He slid his feet into a pair of slip-ons and went out.

She had taken a risk approaching him. He would do her the courtesy of showing up.

She was at the ice machine when he rounded the corner at 2301. Hoodie, hair down, arms crossed. Without the uniform, she looked younger. She watched him come down the corridor and didn't move.

"Ma'am," he said, quietly.

"Who is the woman on your phone?" she hissed.

He looked at her for a moment. "I don't see how that's any of your business, Ma'am."

She held his gaze. He held hers back, level, waiting for her to explain herself or leave. She did neither for a moment. Her jaw worked slightly. Then she took out her phone, tapped something and held it out toward him.

He took it and looked at the screen.

The photograph was taken from a distance. Outside on a street well after sunset. The man's face was turned away from the camera. The woman with him was blonde, tall, her very familiar face smiling and expressing something that made the weight in his chest flare up to twice its mass.

He looked at it for long enough that the Captain would know he recognized the woman.

He handed the phone back.

"The man in the picture," she said, looking as haunted as he imagined he did. "That's my husband."

He met her gaze and said it. "The woman is my wife. Her name is Brenda."

She absorbed that for a single beat. "So my husband is fucking your wife," she said flatly. She leaned against the wall. "I'm sure you can understand how that makes it my business."

"Yes," he said. "I can." He took another breath. "Who is he? What's his name?"

"Lieutenant Colonel Graham George Palmer, United States Army - with the 405th." She said it without expression.

He didn't know the man. But he knew the name. Especially the last name.

"I suspected she was seeing someone," he said, at last. "I thought it was one of her colleagues. A German guy, maybe her colleague at the agency."

She frowned. "Agency?"

"Real estate," he clarified. "Her Dad was a GI. From Ohio. Her Mom is German. She speaks the language. She knows the area."

He saw her eyes lose focus, as if thinking.

"I never thought it would be another soldier." His fist clenched. "Much less an officer."

"But it is."

"Yes."

She looked at him. "What are you going to do about it?"

He was silent for a long moment, looking off, unseeing, thinking, considering. Then he looked back at her. "Nothing... not yet."

The edge in her voice sharpened. "Not yet," she repeated. "Your wife is actively fucking another man and you're saying 'not yet?'"

He tilted his head. "What about you, Ma'am? What are you doing about it? You're his wife. You're an officer. You have evidence. You can have him brought up on an adultery charge much easier than I can."

That stopped her, eyes glaring. Then, abruptly, her shoulders slumped, and her voice lost its sharpness as she looked away.

"I... I have a promotion board in a couple months. And I have a brother who is trying for West Point." She recrossed her arms as if holding herself together. "His family has connections going back two generations of flag officers. If I move on this it blows back on more than just me." She said it quickly, voice small. "So right now I am doing nothing too."

"I'm in the service too, Ma'am," he said, after a moment.

She looked at him.

"My Warrant Officer school packet is at HR command in Knox right now," he said. "Something like this comes up, and it doesn't matter whose fault it is. I'm not getting into Fort Rucker. For good." He paused. "I understand the calculation."

She was quiet for a moment. Something in her expression shifted, slight but visible. "You know who his father is."

"General George Palmer. Retired. Four stars." He said it without inflection. "His grandfather was General Fred Palmer. Three stars."

She nodded slowly.

Nathan continued: "Then there's Senator Walter Marsh on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Ranking member. Last I checked, all the brass are afraid of him. He and General Palmer were in the same West Point class."

"Graham is his nephew," the Captain offered, after a brief look of surprise. "His mother's brother," she added, needlessly.

The corridor was very quiet as they looked at each other, saying nothing.

"So we're in the same position," she said finally, voice soft.

"Yes, Ma'am," he said. "It appears we are."

The ice machine cycled and deposited a load into its reservoir.

He looked at the wall past her shoulder. She looked at the middle distance somewhere past his. The corridor was the same as it had been - the same carpet, the same low hum of the climate system, the same closed doors. Nothing about it had changed.

The ice machine cycled again.

"We should go back to our rooms," she said at last.

"Yes, Ma'am," he said.

Neither of them moved immediately. Then she wordlessly pushed off the wall and walked back down the corridor without looking back. He watched her go. Then he turned and took the stairwell back to his room, took off his shoes and lay down on top of the covers.

He looked at the ceiling and tried to stop thinking about his wife and the O-5 she was very likely entertaining on a bed somewhere at that moment. With no spouses to lie and make excuses to, he couldn't imagine they would be wasting the opportunity.

He suspected Captain Kay Palmer was thinking the same thing.

Sleep came at last. But it was a long time coming.

________________

The forward location was a disused agricultural processing facility from the Eighties, three kilometers from a village with a name that did not appear on any civilian map they had seen. Two large outbuildings, a main structure with a partial roof, and a perimeter that the Army element began securing within minutes of arrival. The Romanian countryside stretched flat and brown in every direction, the sky low and grey.

They had arrived in two vehicles before dawn, blacked out, no headlights for the last eight kilometers.

Kayleigh had her equipment set up and running by 0600. The secure communications architecture took forty minutes to establish and another twenty to test against the contact's exfiltration channel. When the first confirmation ping came back clean she allowed herself one moment of relief and then moved on to the asset destruction protocol.

The outbuilding they had given her team was the smaller of the two, with a concrete floor and two windows covered with blackout material within minutes of arrival. Extension cables ran from a generator outside. Cold enough that she could see her breath for the first hour until the equipment and bodies warmed the space enough to make it bearable.

She worked. That was what they were there to do.

Dominguez ran the communications board with the focused economy of someone who had done this enough times in training that the real version felt familiar. Kenley managed the asset protocol, his hands moving across his keyboard with the speed that she had long since stopped noticing because it was simply what Kenley did. She moved between their stations and ran her own analysis and watched the contact's exfiltration timeline update in increments.

The Army element occupied the larger outbuilding and the perimeter. She heard them more than she saw them in the first hours - radio checks, the sound of equipment being positioned, boots on gravel. Organized and quiet.

LTC Haskell came to her outbuilding at 0800 with two covered mugs of coffee and a situation report.

SSG Miller followed after him with a full carafe of the stuff.

"Ma'am?" he asked her, indicating.

She held out her mug and he poured. Kenley held out his and Miller poured for him and Dominguez too. Two of them outranked him and one did not. But all three thanked him.

He set the carafe on the edge of her workstation, nodded once, and stepped back to stand beside Haskell while the two LTCs talked. She wrapped her hands around the cup, took a sip and closed her eyes for a moment. Real coffee, not the generator-heated water she had been expecting. She did not ask how the Army had managed that.

She looked back at her screen.

Haskell and Osmond ran through the morning's security picture. The hostile technical element had been tracked to a position eleven kilometers from the asset. Moving slowly, which bought time, but moving. The contact was on his exfiltration route and ahead of schedule, which was either good news or a sign that something had accelerated his timeline beyond what they had been told in Bucharest.

Miller asked two questions during the briefing. Both were about the perimeter and the approach vectors from the east. Osmond answered the first using satellite imagery. The second Miller put to his own people - a Specialist named Kaine who had walked the eastern ground before first light and had his own answer ready.

When they left she looked at the coffee cup for a moment before turning back to her work.

The day organized itself into operational rhythms. Contact checks every two hours. She ensured transmissions were short and kept within the authorized windows. The hostile element had found one asset already. Asset protocol updates as the hostile element's position was tracked. Perimeter reports from the Army side filtered through on the shared channel. She ate a ration pack at noon without tasting it and drank water and kept working.