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“Not if they’re on the Fort Holabird Skeet Team, they don’t,” the major said. “I intend to kick the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! out of the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Naval Intelligence Team at the Sunday shoot, and I want PFC Williams to get all the practice he can. Have him there at oh-eight-hundred.”

[ Eight]

Phil did like Fort Holabird.

He learned a great deal in the CIC Administrator School, including how much of a threat the Soviet Union posed to the world in general and the United States specifically, and how they did so—subjects that previously had escaped his attention.

He learned what the Counterintelligence Corps did, and, presuming he completed the training, how he would fit into the Corps.

Put simply, there were three kinds of laborers in the CIC’s fields. At the very bottom of the totem pole were CIC administrators, and their major contribution was to prepare the final reports of CIC special agents and CIC analysts.

His instructors impressed upon him the cardinal rules for preparing reports: One, there were to be no strikeovers, misspellings, and grammatical errors, and, most important, reports could contain absolutely no ambiguities.

If something can be interpreted in more than one way, it will be.

He learned there were two kinds of people senior to ordinary CIC special agents. One of these categories was supervisory special agents, and the other was CIC analysts. It got a little confusing here, as analysts could be pure analysts (that is, neither CIC agents nor supervisory special agents) or they could not.

Analysts analyzed what the agents had discovered in the course of their investigations, and reported their analysis to their superiors, aided and abetted by CIC administrators who prepared—not just typed—such analytical reports.

This was an important distinction.

Any Quartermaster Corps clerk-typist could type a report, many of them without a single strikeover, but a CIC administrator was expected not only to type a report without a single strikeover, but was also expected to inspect it for ambiguities and grammatical errors and then to seek out the author of the report and get him (or her) to fix the ambiguities and errors.

Phil suspected this might cause problems when he “got into the field” over what was and what was not really an ambiguity.

He also learned that the CIC—in addition to denying the Russians and the Cubans and a long list of other “un-friendlies” access to the secrets of the U.S. Army—had two other roles.

One of these was investigating the misbehavior—usually the sexual misbehavior—of field rank and above officers and their dependents. That meant majors through generals and their dependents. Sexual shenanigans of captains, lieutenants, and noncommissioned officers and their dependents were dealt with by the Criminal Investigation Division of the Corps of Military Police.

Phil thought preparing the special agents’ reports of the sexual shenanigans of majors and up—and their dependents, which he had learned meant their wives and offspring—might be very interesting and quietly hoped he would be assigned to a CIC detachment in some hotbed of forbidden sexual activity.

But he thought of himself as a realist, and the reality was that he was probably not going to wind up assigned anywhere interesting, but instead wind up in someplace like Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, preparing the reports of CIC special agents who spent their days working on complete background investigations.

This was known somewhat disparagingly in the counterintelligence community as “ringing doorbells” because the CIC special agents conducted these investigations by going to the neighbors of those being investigated, ringing their doorbells, and then when the door was opened making a presentation from a script they had memorized along these lines:

Good afternoon (or morning), ma’am (or sir). I am Special Agent (Insert Name) of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. (Show CIC credentials folder.)

Your neighbor, John (or Mary) (Insert Last Name), who is now a PFC (or second lieutenant) in the U.S. Army, is being considered for assignment to duties which will give him (or her) access to classified information.

The U.S. Army would be very grateful for your opinion of John (or Mary) and whether or not you think it would be safe for us to entrust him (or her) with the nation’s secrets.

We are especially interested in what you may have heard (or suspect) about John’s (or Mary’s) character flaws, such as, but not limited to, tendencies to write “Insufficient Funds” checks, imbibe intoxicants to an excessive degree, or engage in abnormal sexual activity either within or without the bonds of matrimony.

Your answers will of course be held strictly confidential.

Phil, who had by then accepted the CIC premise that the worst scenario of any situation was nine times out of ten the one right on the money, saw himself spending the foreseeable future in Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, or some similar bucolic metropolis in the middle of the corn belt, preparing the reports of CIC agents who had spent their days ringing doorbells.

He was wrong.

When graduation day from CIC Administrator School came, and with it both his promotion to corporal and his assignment orders, the latter read:

17. CPL Williams, Philip W., 142-22-0136 detchd Co B CICC&S trf in gr wp XXXIII CIC Det APO 09237. Tvl by CIV AT in CIV clothing dir. 10 DDERL Auth. PP Auth. CIV Clothing Allow of $350 auth. Approp. 99-99999999903 (Secret).

Because he had paid attention while a CIC administrator in training, Phil had no difficulty at all in deciphering his orders. He was a bit surprised to see that Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, or whatever bucolic village in the Great American Midwest he was to be banished to had its own Army Post Office (APO) number, but the rest of his orders he understood.

He was being detached from Company B, CIC Center & School, and transferred in grade and would proceed to the 33rd CIC Detachment (for reasons never explained, the CIC used Roman, rather than Arabic, numbers on its CIC detachments). Travel by civilian air transportation in civilian clothing was directed. Ten days of delay-en-route leave were authorized, and so were a passport and a $350 allowance to buy the civilian clothing. The money was to come from Congressional Appropriation 99-99999999903, which was classified Secret because Congress didn’t want the Russians and the other un-friendlies to know how much they were willing to pay to keep the U.S. Army’s secrets secret.

As soon as he could, Phil found the book listing all APO numbers and the physical locations thereof. With a feeling of great foreboding, he ran his finger down the list of numbers until he came to 09237.