Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [4]
"At least we try to be," Katzen pointed out.
"You try to be," Coffey said. "You spend your career looking into nuclear accidents and oil fires and pollution. You make a difference, or at least you challenge yourself. I went into law to wrestle with real global issues, not to find legal loopholes for spies in Third World sweatboxes."
Katzen sighed. "You're schvitzing."
"What?"
"You're sweating. You're cranky. You're a day shy of forty. And you're being way too hard on yourself."
"No, too lenient." Coffey walked toward the cooler nestled in the shade of one of the three nearby tents. He saw the unopened paperback copy of Lord Jim, which he'd brought along to read. It had seemed an appropriate selection when he was standing in the air-conditioned Washington, D.C., bookstore. Now he wished he'd picked up Dr. Zhivago or Call of the Wild. "I think I'm having an epiphany," Coffey said, "like all those patriarchs who used to go into the desert."
"This isn't desert," Katzen said. "It's what we call nonarable pastureland."
"Thanks," Coffey said. "I'll file that next to Batman, Turkey, as something to remember."
"Jeez," Katzen said, "you really are cranky. I don't think being forty is what's doing this. I think the heat's dried up your brains."
"Could be," Coffey said. "Maybe that's why everyone's always been at war in this part of the world. You ever hear about the Eskimos fighting over ice floes or penguin eggs?"
"I've visited the Inuit on the Bering Coast," Katzen said. "They don't fight with each other because they have a different outlook on life. Religion is comprised of two elements: faith and culture. The Inuit have faith without fanaticism, and to them it's a very private matter. The culture is the public part. They share wisdom, tradition, and fables instead of insisting that their way is the only way. The same is true of many tropical and sub-tropical peoples in Africa, South America, and the Far East. It has nothing to do with the climate."
"I don't believe that about the climate," Coffey said. "At least, not entirely." He removed a can of Tab from the melting ice in the cooler and popped it. As he poured the soda into his mouth, he squinted back at the long, gleaming van. For a moment, the despair left him. That seemingly nondescript vehicle was beautiful and sexy. He was proud to be associated with it, at least. The attorney stopped drinking and caught his breath. "I mean," he said, panting after the long, unbroken swallow, "look at cities or prisons where there are riots. Or compounds like Jonestown and Waco where people turn into cult-kooks. It never happens during a cold spell or a blizzard. It's always when it's hot. Look at the Biblical scholars who went out into the desert. Went out men, stayed in the heat, came back prophets. Heat lights our fuses."
"You don't think that God could have had anything to do with Moses and Jesus?" Katzen asked solemnly.
Coffey raised the canto his lips. "Touché," he said before he drank again.
Katzen turned to the young black woman standing to his right. She was dressed in khaki shorts, a sweat-stained khaki blouse, and a white headband. The uniform was "sterile." Nowhere did she display the winged-lightning shield of the rapid-deployment Striker force to which she belonged. Nor was there any other sign of military affiliation. Like the van itself, whose side-mounted mirror looked just like a mirror and not a parabolic dish, whose walls were intentionally dented and artificially rusted and didn't show a hint of the reinforced steel underneath, the woman looked like she was a seasoned archaeological field worker.
"What do you think, Sondra?" Katzen asked.
"With all due respect," said the young black woman, "I think you're both wrong. I think peace and war and sanity are all questions of leadership. Look at that old city out there." She spoke with quiet reverence. "Thirty centuries ago the prophet Abraham was born--right there. That was where he lived when God told him to