Chapter 3 third chapter

"Losing weight?" Puller asked. His brother Robert leaned back in the chair, crossing one long leg over the other. "The food here isn't as good as in the Air Force." "The navy has the best food. The army ranks third, which is not a little bit worse. But that's because the guys in the sky and in the water are soft bones." Puller quoted the Army's usual quip. "I heard that you became a warrant officer and are no longer a sergeant." "Still doing the same job. Paying a little more." "Are you willing to do this?" "I'd love to do it."

They fell silent.Puller looked to the left, where a young woman was shaking the hand of the male prisoner she was meeting with, showing him some pictures.Two fair-haired children were playing on the floor at their mother's feet.Puller turned back to look at his brother. "Didn't you find a lawyer again?" Robert Puller moved.He also looked at the man and woman next to him just now.Robert was thirty-seven years old, never married, and had no children. "There's nothing a lawyer can do. How's Dad?" Puller's mouth twitched. "Still the same."

"Have you seen him?" "Was there last week," Puller said. "What do the doctors say?" "Like your lawyers, doctors can't do more." "Give him my regards." "He understands." This made him angry. "I know. I always knew he understood." Robert's loud voice caused the stout gendarme by the wall to stare at him for a moment. Robert said in a low voice, "Nevertheless, you do say hello to him for me." "Need something?" "There's nothing for you to offer. Besides, you don't have to come here to see me all the time."

"I would." "Do you feel sorry for being a younger brother?" "It has something to do with being my younger brother." Robert's hand slid across the table. "The conditions here are not that bad. Not as bad as the Leavenworth federal penitentiary." "It's strange, after all, this is also a prison." Puller leaned forward, "Did you really do it?" Robert raised his eyes and said, "I wonder why you haven't asked me that in the past." "I'm asking now." "I have nothing to say about that," replied the brother.

"Do you think I'm trying to sneak a confession out of you? You've already been convicted." "I don't think you're really trying to get anything out of it. You're from the Criminal Investigations Department, though. I understand your views on justice. I don't want you to be confronted with an unresolvable dilemma between family and morality." Puller leaned back. "One size fits all, and I'll separate the two." "Of course, as the son of old John Pooler. I understand all that." "You always see being his son as a heavy burden."

"Aren't you?" Robert asked. "It depends on how we approach this. You're smarter than me, and you should be able to figure it out yourself." "Anyway, we're both in the military." "You've been an officer since the beginning, just like Dad. I'm just a draft soldier." "And you say I'm smarter?" "You're a scientist who studies nuclear weapons, and you're a specialist in mushroom clouds. I'm just a soldier with a badge on." "Wearing the badge," my brother repeated, adding, "I guess I was lucky enough to survive."

"There hasn't been an execution here since 1961." "Have you checked?" "I checked." "National security. Treason. Yeah, I was lucky to be alive." "You feel lucky?" "Perhaps it is." "So I guess you answered my question. Need anything?" Puller repeated. His brother tried to grin, but couldn't hide his unease. "Why do I feel like you're asking this to mean that the meeting is over." "I'm just asking." "Nothing, I'm fine." He replied listlessly, as if all the vitality in him evaporated in an instant.

Puller looked at his brother.There is a two-year difference between them.The two were inseparable as children, and when they grew up, they both donned military uniforms for the country.And now he felt a wall between him and his brother, higher than the walls of this prison.Confronted with this feeling, Puller found himself powerless.He looked at his brother, but he felt that his brother was not really here, replaced by this stranger in the orange prison uniform who was going to spend the rest of his life in this building.Maybe the wall will last forever. "A guy got killed here a while ago," said Robert.Puller knew this.

"Exemplary inmate at the prison. Smashed in the head with a baseball bat on the field." "Have you already asked?" "I asked. Do you know that guy?" Robert shook his head. "I'm 23 plus 1 now. I don't have that much time to socialize." He meant that he had to be locked in a cell for 23 hours a day, and only one hour was allowed to be released in a certain isolation area. It was the first time Puller had heard of the situation. "Since when?" Robert smiled and asked, "You mean you didn't find out about it?" "Since when?"

"Ever since I beat up a guard." "why?" "Because he said something that I didn't like to hear." "What did you say?" "You don't need to know." "why?" "Trust me. Like you said, I'm the smart brother. They can't add any more to my sentence." "What does it have to do with Dad?" "You better leave now. I don't want you to miss your flight back." "I still have time. Is it because the man said something to Dad?" "This isn't an interrogation, my boy. You can't ask me for another statement. I was tried by a court-martial."

Puller looked down at his brother's shackles. "They pass you food through the slits?" The doors of the prison camps in the U.S. military are all solid doors without railings.Three meals a day for prisoners in solitary confinement came in through a narrow crack in the door.There was also a movable panel at the bottom of the door that could be pulled away so that the guards could put the fetters on the prisoner from the outside before opening the door. Robert nodded. "I guess I'm really lucky that they didn't completely ban me from being in contact with other people. Otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here face to face right now." "Did they ever threaten you like that?" "Here they say everything." The two sat in silence. Robert said afterwards: "You go away. I have something to do. I'm really busy here." "I will come again." "No reason to come again. Maybe there's a better reason not to come." "I'll pass your regards to Papa." They stood up and shook hands.Robert reached out and patted his brother on the shoulder. "Do you miss the Middle East?" "No. I don't know of anyone who served there who still misses it?" "I'm so glad you came back alive." "There are a lot of people who don't." "Are you working on any interesting case?" "There's no big case at hand." "Take care." "Okay, take care of yourself too." Puller's words sound hollow before they're even said.He turned to leave, and at the same time the gendarmes came up to take his brother. "Hey John?" Puller turned around.The gendarme's large hand was clutching his brother's upper left arm.Puller couldn't help but want to tear the gendarme's hand away and punch him to the ground again.However, this was just his momentary thought. "Huh?" Their eyes locked together. "It's nothing, man. It's nothing. It's good to see you." The young gendarme standing by the security gate snapped to attention as Puller passed.Puller walked down the stairs, two steps at a time, to the car he had rented.The phone rang.He looked down at the caller ID. This is the number of the 701st Military Police Group at Quantico Military Base, Virginia.Puller served there as a CID investigator. He picked up the phone and listened in silence.The army taught him to listen less and listen more. His answer was curt: "I'm leaving now." He glanced at his watch and quickly counted the flight and driving time.Flying from west to east, there is an hour time difference. "Three hours and fifty minutes, sir." A homicide scene has been discovered in a remote location in West Virginia.One of the victims was an army colonel, which required the CID to intervene in the investigation.What Puller couldn't understand was why the case had to go to the 701st Military Police Group.But he is a soldier.He has orders.He will carry out the order. Puller was to fly back to Virginia, pick up his personal effects and work gear, and drive hastily to that remote part of West Virginia.At this moment, however, he was not thinking of the slain colonel, but of the look on his brother's face when he parted from him.It has been firmly engraved in the depths of Puller's mind.Puller was good at sorting out and differentiating things, and pushing away the thoughts that distracted him.But right now he doesn't want to do that.The memory of his elder brother in different periods and on different occasions emerged before his eyes one after another. Robert Pooler was a fast-promoting Air Force major.His role is to help oversee the country's nuclear arsenal.He would have been well-assured to at least be a brigadier general, perhaps a major general.But now he was convicted of treason, and he couldn't leave this punishment camp until he breathed his last breath. But he's still Puller's older brother, and not even the U.S. military can change that. Puller quickly got into the car and started the ignition and put it in gear.Whenever he moves away from here, he seems to leave a small part of himself behind.Maybe one day he'll leave with nothing on him. He has always been a moody person.When the comrades around him died on the battlefield, he never cried.They usually died horribly, but he avenged the deaths of his comrades in an equally grievous way.He never goes to the front line with uncontrollable anger because that only makes you vulnerable and the weak don't win.Puller did not shed a tear when the court-martial pronounced his brother guilty.The Puller men never cry. This is the first house rule. The Puller man will remain calm and restrained in any situation, because only in this way can he increase his odds. This is the second house rule. If there are other rules, it probably has no more meaning. John Puller is not a machine.However, he felt that he was very close to becoming a machine. Let's stop here.He refuses to do any more self-analysis of himself. He left the punishment camp much faster than when he came.A faster plane, flying west to east, would carry him headlong into a new case. Puller liked taking on new cases, as long as it helped him divert his mind away from that which he would never understand, which he had no control over—his family.