GORDON KENT

NIGHT TRAP

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

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About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dedication

To our shipmates and squadron-mates, who will know the facts from the fictions.

1
14 March 1990. 2137 Zulu. Amsterdam.

He was only a small man in a dark raincoat. He wore glasses, speckled now with raindrops. A minor bureaucrat, you would have said. Nobody. Completely forgettable.

He turned into a wet little pocket park and followed the lighted path for twenty meters and then turned away into the darkness on a set of log steps that climbed steeply behind rhododendrons. At the top was room enough for two or three people who could, if they wanted, look at the Amsterdam skyline, or, if they looked down, watch the heads of people on the path below—if there had been any people.

He watched the path. After three minutes, a woman appeared. She had entered from the other direction and was coming slowly along through the pools of light, moving with the rolling caution of pregnancy. He watched her, watched behind her, then slipped down through the wet bushes and was beside her.

The woman, startled, swayed back, then seemed to recognize him and to pull herself in, as if protecting herself or her child. He spoke rapidly, very low; he might have been selling her something useful but not interesting—insurance, perhaps. She chewed her upper lip, messing the too-red lipstick.

Traffic hummed beyond the park, but here in the rain there were only the two of them, and they might as well have been in the privacy of a locked room for all the attention they drew.

The man asks her something. He seems urgent.

She shakes her head.

He says two or three words. His body is stiffer. What has he said: Are you sure? You won’t? We can’t?

She shakes her head more quickly and tries to pull away.

He took his right hand from his raincoat pocket and slashed her throat from side to side, and she fell back on the black asphalt, her red blood pumping out and spreading into a puddle of water that lay like ink.

The man walked away.

Seven minutes later, he was in a taxi. He took a white card from his gray pocket, found a black pen and with it made a mark beside the first of four names on a list. A small minus sign.

2247 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

“Spy?”

“Huh? Yes, Rafe?”

“Remember we’re in EMCON, and stay shut down for Christ’s sake until I give the word, got it?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

Alan Craik glanced aside at the SENSO, a senior chief so good at his craft that Alan felt like a kid with him. Alan always wanted to ask him a kid’s questions—How do you know that? How do you do that? How, why, why, but—? He was a kid, he thought miserably, a beginner among men made mature by their skills.

“Goin’ for a ride,” Rafe said. The elaborate casualness, the cowboy intonation, was what Alan didn’t have, at once both real coolness and overdone, flyboy bravado.

Alan’s innards dropped to his socks as the plane roared from the catapult. He should be getting used to it, he thought; why couldn’t he be casual and cool? Was anybody else afraid he was going to be sick? Did anybody else think they were going into the black ocean instead of the night sky?

And would he ever be able to make a carrier takeoff and not think of his warrior father and what a burden it was to be the warrior’s son?

15 March. 0121 Zulu. Near Heathrow.

Where the road makes a bend toward Iver, there is a stone bridge over a little river. At the Iver end of the bridge, if you look to the right, a sign is visible among the branches announcing the private grounds of a fishing club; there is a metal gate.

The unremarkable man in the raincoat and eyeglasses turned down toward this gate, hardly slowing although the path was dark and wet. He produced a key, unlocked the gate, and went through. As he had in Amsterdam, he went up the bank instead of along the path, this time examining the fence with a tiny flashlight and satisfying himself that the old breaks and holes were still there. The lock and the gate, it appeared, were mostly symbolic.

Again, he waited and watched. The sky was dull copper from London’s light on the low clouds; out on the bridge, glowing spheres of mist formed around streetlamps. After six minutes, a silhouette moved slowly to the center of the stone bridge—an overweight man, black among the bare black branches; he leaned over, seemed to study the water but actually looked up and down the fishing length. Then he, too, let himself in at the gate; unlike the small man, he moved uncertainly, and he swore once and then put on a light that he carried covered in his fingers so that only bits of it seemed to fall at his feet. He came along the fisherman’s path, breathing heavily.

The man in the raincoat spoke a name. Fred. Not quite a whisper, hoarse, betraying an accent: Fr-r-red. The other man turned. He was a little frightened. In the soft light from the bridge, he could be seen to have heavy lips and the kind of thick eyelids that look as if they have been weeping.

The man in the raincoat went down to him. He spoke with what seemed to be urgency, one hand extended, the other in his coat pocket. Again, there was a sense of selling something, of persuasion; his head cocked as Fred lowered his eyes; he might almost have been trying to get below Fred’s face, to look up into it. A word was audible, as if it was so important it had been spoken louder, extended: money.

Fred rubbed his fat chin. Both men looked around. Fred looked up at the glowing sky, said something, laughed. Nervous laughter.

The smaller man leaned in again. He repeated the question. Well? Yes or no?

Whatever Fred said, it was barely muttered, certainly not emphatic; but it was enough, and the smaller man smiled, nodded, took Fred’s upper arm and squeezed the muscle, then patted it. Good dog. Fred grinned.

They spoke for another two minutes. Mostly, the small man explained. Fred nodded or muttered understanding. Then abruptly, the smaller man hit Fred on the arm again and walked off.

Eight minutes later, he was standing beside a telephone in the shadow of a closed pub. He lit his tiny flashlight. He took out the white card. He passed over the first name with its minus sign. His pen touched Fred’s name. He made a small plus.

The pen passed down to the third name: Clanwaert.

He checked his watch. Then he dialed a number in Moscow and waited while the long, clumsy connection was made, all that antiquated technology, and a man’s voice answered, and he said, “Tell them, ‘Get ready.’”

0136 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

Six thousand feet above the water, buffeting at four hundred and thirty knots, alpha golf seven zero seven was flying search patterns. An aged S-3B hardly younger than her crew, she was getting tired. The men inside were getting bored.

Below, the black Atlantic roiled in a March squall, unseen, silent to the four men in the darkened old aircraft.

The S-3B was searching the mid-Atlantic for a home-bound US battle group. Running opposing-force exercises on the carrier you relieve is an old tradition in the fleet, and no outbound battle group CO wants to be found by the smart-assed flyers of the carrier he is replacing. So AG 707 was the forward scout, trying to find a battle group hidden somewhere between Gibraltar and Cape Hatteras.

“I think you got us way too far south, Spy,” the pilot said now. “Where you think these fuckers are hiding, the South Pole?”

The squadron intelligence officer is often called “Spy”—if he isn’t called worse. Alan Craik was a new Spy—a very junior grade lieutenant, his ensign’s wetness hardly dried behind his ears. The pilot, Rafehausen, didn’t much like him. But he called him “Spy” and not something worse because Craik was the only IO he’d ever known who was willing to crawl into a tired old beast like AG 707 and put in his hours with the grownups.

As the old line went, How is an intel officer like Mister Ed? He can talk but he can’t fly.

But this kid did.

Seven hours in an ejection seat was still torment to him. But there were rewards for Alan Craik, not least the discovery that he was good at the “back end” craft—reading the screens, coaxing discoveries from radar and computer. And there was the reward, to be earned slowly, of being accepted by the flyers.

And by his father.

“Come on, Spy, give us a break.”

Before he could answer, Senior Chief Craw broke in. “He’s doin’ just fine, sir; give him some slack. He’s tryin’ to find the ass on the gnat that lives on a gnat’s ass.”

Rafe groaned. The old aircraft shook itself like a dog and plowed on through the night.

0141 Zulu. Moscow.

Nikkie Geblev the go-getter punched his touchtone phone and cursed Gorbachev the president and Yeltsin the mayor and anybody else responsible for his not living in New York, or maybe LA, and tried for the third time to beat the phone into submission: Get through, you fucker! he wanted to shout at it. Make connections! Be a winner!

Nikkie Geblev was surrounded with electronic gadgets that had begun their existences in Japan and Taiwan and Italy and then had had the luck to be on a truck that had been hijacked in Finland. Nikkie was an entrepreneur. A New Soviet Man. A Eurocapitalist. A crook.

“At last,” he said aloud. He was making money, relaying this call.

He heard it ring at the other end, then be picked up.

“What?” a man’s voice said.

“I’m looking for Peter from Pravda.”

Pause. Resignedly: “Peter went to Intertel.”

Nikkie didn’t want to know anything about who the man was or what was going to happen next, but he couldn’t help the images that rose in his mind—a tough man, unshaven, cruel—ex-military, hungry, impatient—Nikkie had dodged the draft because of Afghanistan and he didn’t like to think of the way ex-military would treat him if they knew. They had grenades—guns—

Nikkie cut off the images by saying, “Peter says ‘Get ready.’”

He broke the connection. He was sweating and his knees felt weak.

0439 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

Everybody in the squadron called the plane Christine, after Stephen King’s killer car. And Christine was a killer. Her nose had taken the head off a sailor during a cat shot; squadron myth said bits of him were still embedded in her radome. Long ago, in her first life as an S-3A, she had fired the rear ejection seats without human help, sending the back-end aircrew into ESCAPAC and smashing their legs on their keypads. Now, rekitted as an S-3B, she was like an aging queen with a facelift—older than she looked, and nasty.

She expressed herself tonight in vibrations and the unpredictable. Odd vacillations in a gauge. False readings from a fuel tank. A nut that could be seen slowly unscrewing itself just beyond the copilot’s window. Nothing serious, because Christine was not in one of her killer moods; only minor, constant, nerve-picking trivia. A mean old aircraft for a long, dull mission.

Boredom and discomfort. Old aircraft smells, engine noise, the abrasion of personality on personality. Four hours down; three to go, Alan thought. He yawned. Where was the battle group? Why did he care?

Christine shivered and gave him a temporary blip and made his heart lurch, and then he saw it was nothing.

What was in his lunch box? Should he drink some coffee?

How come Craw had stood up for him like that?

Would any of these guys ever begin to like him?

How many hours to go?

“Hey, Spy, what’s the word? I’m not going all the way to fucking Ascension Island! What’s the program, man?”

Bicker, bicker. Rafehausen would never like him, he supposed. What you might call a difference in culture.

Still. “I want to get where I can catch it in a wide sweep, Rafe.”

“They won’t go that far out of their way! These bastards have been one hundred and ninety days at sea. Which you haven’t!” Rafe wanted to stay closer to the carrier. He wanted to show that he thought that this was Mickey-Mouse fun and games. He wanted to scream that this was bullshit.

The copilot, a nervous j.g. everybody called Narc, sucked up to Rafe. “Yeah, wait till you’ve been out for your one-ninety, Spy. Nobody wants to make it one ninety-one.” Then, purely for Rafehausen’s benefit, “Only the fuckin’ Spy—” They laughed, the sounds tinny in his intercom.

Alan felt himself blush. He tried to see if Senior Chief Craw was grinning, but he could make out only helmet and mask in the green light of the screens. But it wouldn’t have mattered if the man’s head had been bobbing with laughter. He knew people thought he was funny. Because he was serious, he was funny. There was something peculiar in that. Well, it was true: nothing was Mickey Mouse to Alan. He took even games very seriously.

Alan tried to think of something to say, something that would be funny and cool and would make them like him, but by then Rafe and Narc had forgotten him and his grids and his plots; they were bickering about fuel and the readings Christine was giving them.

How many hours to go?

Nothing ever happens, he thought. Somewhere, things must be happening. Somewhere.

He thought of Kim. He resisted thinking of Kim, her inescapable eroticism a painful pleasure in these surroundings. Beautiful. Rich. Fun. Sex, my God. A woman who would—

Think of the radar screen instead. The pale green blank, with its hypnotic moving radius.

Kim in the bed in Orlando. Kim laughing, nude. Kim—

Think of the radar screen.

How many hours to go?

0459 Zulu. Brussels.

He had circles under his eyes now as he came into the air terminal, but he was little different from the others. Businessmen getting a jump on the day—businesswomen, too. They carried sleek attachés and laptops and were dressed for success, but nobody looked very bright yet.

The rain had ended but the tarmac was still wet. He came out of the terminal, took a taxi to a hotel within the airport, and, when he had dismissed the car, walked away toward the terminal he had just come from. A half-mile brought him to an area of sheds, more like a factory than an airport. Without pausing, he went between two of the buildings to a loading dock where trucks would be backing in another hour. He checked his watch, then the sky. No sign of the sun yet.

He waited in the shadows. He did not lean against the wall, despite his fatigue. He was a man of will, not easily recognized as such because of his fussiness and his pedantic attention to detail—the flashlight, the list.

Clanwaert plodded toward him through a shallow puddle. Clanwaert was a plodder, the thing he prized about the man. Unsurprising, steady. Capable of change? Perhaps not. In the pocket of the raincoat, his hand tightened on a piece of steel wire.

He called to Clanwaert from the shadows. Clanwaert tried to see him, failed, perhaps caught the glint of his eyeglasses because he began to search for a way up on the loading dock. To his right was a dumpster, which might have offered handholds to a younger or more agile man. Instead, he walked fifty feet the other way and struggled up a steel ladder like an exhausted swimmer coming out of a pool. He plodded back toward the shadows.

The man in the raincoat spoke for a full minute. His tired voice had the same tone of urgency, a kind of metallic hopefulness. Would Clanwaert? This great opportunity. More money.

But Clanwaert resisted. His voice rose; even invisible in the darkness, he was a man taking a stand. Surprising, to anybody who had seen his heavy plodding, he was a man of passion—and, it seemed, of hatred for the man in the raincoat. The word traitor hissed out.

“That is all dead now,” the man in the raincoat said.

Clanwaert raged at him. Perhaps the man had meant that a god was dead, for Clanwaert resisted, the way people resist a threat to their religion. At last, he ran down, gave a rumble or two, fell silent.

“I am sorry,” the other man’s voice came clearly from the shadow. “Look out there.” One hand appeared in the light. Clanwaert turned to follow where it pointed.

The steel garrote fell over his face silently and tightened; heavy as he was, the smaller man was able to deal with him. Exercise of the will, passion of a different kind.

Grunting, he dragged Clanwaert to the edge of the loading dock and rolled him into the dumpster.

Twenty minutes later, he was in a terminal different from the one at which he had landed. He found a telephone in a bank of telephones, half of them occupied now by business people making their arrangements for the day. He put his notecard in front of him as he cradled the telephone and began to punch the buttons: another call to Moscow. As the connection was being made, he put a minus sign next to Clanwaert’s name.

“Yes?” the tight voice said in Moscow.

“Tell them, ‘Go.’”

He put the instrument back and looked at the last name on the list. Bonner. He touched it with his pen. He sighed. Bonner. He made a small question mark next to the name. For a few seconds, he hesitated there, apparently unsure of himself for the first time—made so by fatigue or by the thought of Bonner, and whatever difficulties that name represented.

0615 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

“Spy? You shut down back there?”

The night was almost over. Alan’s hand hovered over the switch that would shut the back end down. Once he threw it, the old computer (“the best technology of the 1970s”) would die and the radar sweeps would end. Their search for the homebound battle group would be over.

But he didn’t want to give up. “What if the BG went north of the Azores?” he said into the intercom. “Radar might have missed them if they hid between those islands.”

“Come on—shut down! This mission is over!”

He hated to let go. One more sweep, one more experiment—he didn’t believe there were problems that couldn’t be solved.

His hand wavered over the switch but didn’t touch it.

“We went way north of the Azores coming back in ‘86,” Craw said in his Maine twang. Craw always sounded like a comedy act but was a deeply serious man who couldn’t understand why people smiled when he spoke. “Admiral Cutter, there wa’nt anything he wouldn’t do to keep from bein’ found, no sir.”

“Oh, great,” Rafe moaned. “Jeez, Senior Chief, whose fucking side are you on? I want a slider and the rack! Spy, next time have your great idea before I’m almost in the stack, for Christ’s sake.”

Narc nosed in with, “Anyway, we’re in EMCON.” EMCON—Emission Control Condition.

But the senior chief’s voice was as stubborn as a lobsterman’s defending his right to put traps where his father and his grandfather had. “We’re not inside fifty miles just yet. Look heah—” This to Alan. “Set up the sweep as we turn nawth. The stack’s offset this way anyhow.”

“Oh, Christ—!” he heard Rafe say.

Alan peered forward, just able to read the compass. He set up the sweep as the senior chief instructed; let Rafe contradict them with a direct order if he cared so much. As the compass touched north he punched the keyboard, and the radar expanded to cover hundreds of miles of ocean. Craw watched from his own board as the circular picture of their world appeared, at the center their aircraft. To the east were the fourteen ships of their own battle group. Two blips showed visibly larger than the rest: their carrier, USS Thomas Jefferson, and, unusual for peacetime, a second carrier, the Franklin D. Roosevelt. To the north and west were the Azores, more than two hundred miles away and showing only as grainy blobs. Alan sorted out those shapes, the real islands’ outlines stored somewhere in his brain along with a knowledge of the effects of this radar; his fingers coaxed more detail from the computer, put the name PICO in bright green capitals on the island to which it belonged.

Just south of the main island, two faint blips glowed. He tabbed each on the computer and updated it until he had a standard course and speed. Bingo! He was excited by the chase now, oblivious to Rafe.

“Two UNID surface contacts! Range two-ninety. Christ Senior, we must have some duct.”

“She’s a beauty.”

“Speed thirty to forty knots. One big banana and one little banana. I think—I think, guys—” His fingers worked the keyboard as he prepared to place the contacts in the datalink.

Rafe’s voice sliced into his excitement. “This is the Mission Commander—just to remind you two. I just put us fifty miles out from the carrier and we’re in EMCON. Do not rotate or radiate!” He was silent for a second or two to let it sink in. “Now shut down the back end!”

Alan debated the notion of rebellion. He was angry, but he knew part of the anger was fatigue. What the hell—Rafe was in command; let him take the flak if there was any. But still—Fuck it. He pushed the switch, and the radar image collapsed on its center and was gone. He began to clean up his side of the aircraft.

0619 Zulu. Moscow.

Number 1743 was a nondescript office building put up sometime after the Great Patriotic War, vaguely influenced by Western designs of the fifties, so probably from the seventies. It had a central entrance and a guard who was nothing more than a presence—an aging man in two sweaters who sometimes had this or that to sell. He would be no trouble.

There were four men. Despite differences, they looked alike because they were all of the same age and they had all led the same life—former Spetsnaz. Three of the four needed a shave; none of them wore a tie or a hat.

The guard waved them to stop.

The first man put a hand on the old man’s chest and pushed him gently back while the others went past. Then the man told him to lie face down, showing him a pistol. The old man lay down. The young man shot him in the back of the head.

They trotted up the two flights of stairs and turned right and trotted to a door that said VENUX in English characters. Inside were fluorescent lights and head-height partitions in cheap beige fabric, a sense of modernity and busyness rare in that building, in that city.

The four men went through the door, took out silenced Type 51 Kalashnikovs and began firing through the partitions. They sprayed the room methodically, and when one ejected a clip he would drop it into a bag and slam home another and resume shooting. Men and women were screaming and trying to run away, and a man looked over a partition by jumping up and down until he was hit. Others were heroic and tried to shield the fallen, until they were hit, too.

Two of the men went from cubicle to cubicle, shooting each body in the head, alive or dead. The third man guarded the door, while the fourth took a device from his backpack, carried it to the center of the room, and, checking his watch, tripped a timer.

They trotted out one after another, covering each other, the first one firing at the horrified people in the corridor, and each one after him, firing as he ran, to the stairs, down the stairs, and they were gone.

The bomb blew and fire belched from the smashed windows.

0624 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

Christine was seconds from the wire. She had two thousand pounds of fuel—plenty for one landing, dicey if she had to go around again and nobody up to give her more. To Rafehausen, Christine felt like a reluctant partner at the prom—she did what he wanted, just not exactly in time to his moves. Mushy, he thought.

Rafe wanted to see the boat. He didn’t dare glance at the altimeter; instead, he was staring into the darkness, trying to find the lens—the cluster of lights at the port bow that would guide him down. Where was the fucking lens?

Then Christine broke out of the squall and there was too much light, too much brightness, as if the whole reflective surface of the deck had struck his dark-accustomed eyes at once. He winced. At the same time, he found the lens, and the voice inside his head that was really eight years of flying experience said Wrong! Wrong set of lights, it meant.

Wrong.

Wrong for landing.

Wrong for me. And this inner voice, which the good pilot hears like an angel’s whisper, said much more: it said Power; it said Go; it said airspeed lift altitude move MOVE! All in an instant because the lights were not set for an S-3B, meaning that the tension on the wires was wrong and the instructions were wrong, and the boat was expecting somebody else.

Rafe wanted to look over his shoulder for the F-14 that might be landing right on top of him.

And the voice said Wrong: you’re trying to land on the wrong fucking boat.

Blinding light all around him. The deck was there there there THERE! The tail slammed down; the plane lurched; Rafe went to high power—

—and they didn’t stop. No blow to the ribs. No neglected junk flying past them in the false wind of deceleration. Only hurtling down the deck on the edge of airspeed, night vision shot to shit by the landing lights, sparks rooster-tailing from their hook, and a second later falling over the front end into the dark without a hope, yet hoping, praying.

All of them astonished and scared and seeing nothing but light as they flashed down the deck of the wrong carrier—not seeing the startled air officer in Pri-Fly, not seeing the deck crew flinch back from them, not seeing the man who was down on the catwalk, safe but still flattening himself against the far bulkhead as if he thought they would take his head off, their lights flashing on the name-patch on his left breast: Bonner, S.

2
0625 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

Alan clenched his teeth. Even in the back end, the light as they came out of the squall had dazzled him, yet he had stayed braced. Then, the failure to stop had tricked his senses; he had even leaned into his harness as if the hook had caught. Now, as they came off the bow, he felt the plane falling. Light vanished; everything was blackness and electronic green. And then, climbing agonizingly away from the black water as if crawling out of a hole, he felt Christine decide not to kill them.

“Bolter, bolter,” Craw muttered.

“Shut up!” Rafe bellowed.

“Hookslap?” Narc said.

“It wasn’t my lens.” Rafe was incapable of dishonesty, at least about flying—and at least to another pilot. He cut the back end off the intercom and said to Narc, “It wasn’t my boat! Fuck, fuck fuck fuck FUCK. Twelve hundred pounds of fucking fuel left! We gotta land on the wrong fucking boat!”

On the flight deck, the Landing Signal Officer was already jabbering to Pri-Fly, where a paunchy commander in a yellow jersey with “Miniboss” across the chest was staring into the rain.

“What the hell?” the Miniboss (the Assistant Air Officer) moaned.

“It was an S-3. We haven’t got an S-3 up.”

“You sure? You better be sure!”

“I’m sure.”

Miniboss turned away from his bubble window and muttered, “Well, I’m not,” and he hollered at a lieutenant he didn’t know to check the sheets for an outstanding S-3. Had they got the goddam count wrong or what? And while you’re at it get somebody up here who knows S-3s even if you have to wake the squadron’s skipper because that sonofabitch is going to come around again; and he said into his mike to the LSO, “What’s he going to do?”

“We’re under EMCON; I’m not in contact.”

“The way I read it, he’s from the Jefferson. Get his fuel load.”

“We’re under EMCON.”

“Well, get out from under! Set the lens for an S-3 and find if he can get back to his own boat! If he can’t, prepare to receive.” He turned away to order somebody to keep the Combat Air Patrol airborne until it was over; get their fuel and estimated time aloft; while you’re at it—

The LSO had already had the lens reset. He was already prepared to receive. He had expected to recover two F-18-As; the lens had been set for them. He imagined the S-3 catching a wire set for the much lighter F-18-A and winced.

All in a night’s work.

Rafe caught the flare of lights that signaled him to try again. Narc had talked on the ball to the LSO and told him that their fuel was down. So, the worst was going to happen: he, LT George Rafehausen, veteran carrier pilot, sometime wingman of the squadron skipper, was going to land on the wrong boat. Rafe blew out his breath in disgust.

This time he kept it simple. By the numbers. He gentled Christine into the approach. His angle of attack was perfect. At least he’d make a good landing.

Then he watched as the carrier began to turn.

He had to chase the turn. His numbers went out the window. They were turning away from the squall to help him, but that made no odds to him. Why weren’t things ever easy?

“Smoke in the tunnel,” Spy’s voice said over the intercom.

There was a break, then Senior’s voice: “Tape’s still turning. Friction fire. Gawdamned Christine.” Then, “I’ll get it.”

The brightness of the deck was close.

“No time,” Rafe said. “Senior, stay strapped; I’m putting this sucker down.”

Rafe coughed as the smoke hit him. Why wasn’t he wearing his mask? His eyes watered. This time he kept the carrier in sight. He had his landing well in hand again; he could feel it. Again the light hit him, and then the deck reached up and slammed the plane.

His angle was too steep. Not by much, just some instant’s inattention in the fumes. Too steep and too soon, and the tail smashed the deck just forward of the one wire. Bitched. Rafe felt it and was into high power, and the plane shot off into the looming dark.

Another bolter. He couldn’t believe it.

The LSO was already on to Pri-Fly. “Hook snapped,” he said.

“Oh, shit.”

“Readying the net.”

“Understood.”

Hooks take a beating. Crews check them after every landing. But they can miss a hairline fracture, especially if a man is thinking about his wife or his debts or his future. Or maybe in this case it was Christine, trying something new.

Anyway, they had lost their hook.

On the flight deck, men in blue jerseys were clearing away the broken hook. Others in red jerseys stood by—the crash crew.

The LSO announced the hooksnap to a stunned audience of four and said that the barrier was being rigged. Asked for their gas status: eight hundred pounds.

Alan, for once, was unworried. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. His father had told him tales of landing crippled aircraft into the “barrier,” which Alan, as a kid, had seen as a giant volleyball net raised across the deck to catch wounded planes. His father used to say he had done it so often they called him “Net” at the club. He said it was the easiest landing in the world.

And, after all, you have no choice. There is no other way to put a hookless aircraft down on a flight deck—not one that keeps the pieces together.

Senior Chief Craw seemed more worried about the smoking computer tape. He unclipped his harness and lunged for the tunnel behind their seats, wrestled with the box and swung it open. The smell got worse. Alan, now concerned for Craw because he was unstrapped and the break might come at any time, grabbed his thermos and, without thinking, poured cold coffee over the fire.

The smell changed from burned electrics to burned coffee.

The plane banked. Craw slammed against his seat and then slipped into it. The plane banked again.

“Make ready!” Rafe growled.

Senior Chief Craw was clumsy getting his straps clipped. The aircraft turned hard, and Craw winced. Alan realized that the man’s hands were burned.

Alan reached up under his own safety toggles and pulled the clips. Free from the waist up, he leaned across the aisle and pushed the Senior Chief back in his seat, then moved the man’s hands away from the straps. Surprisingly, getting the prongs into the clips turned out to be easier on somebody else.

“Here we go!” Rafe said.

Alan slammed back into his seat and reached over his shoulder for his harness straps. They weren’t there. Of course not; he was leaning back on them.

“Ejection positions!” Narc snapped.

He forced himself to move slowly: lean forward, reach up and over your shoulder. Get one. Flip it out into position and pat around for the other. Find it. Lean back. Don’t think about ejecting. Clip one restraint. No problem. Clip the other. Regain your landing posture and brace. Only now do you have time to think, If we’d had to eject while the straps were off, I’d be dead.

And then, he realized that he didn’t feel airsick. He felt fine. His mind was strangely, eerily clear. He felt ready for—was that Death, just down there ahead of them? No, it couldn’t be. He felt ready, then, for whatever came next. It was liberating, not having to think.

He wanted to tell Rafe not to worry; that Rafe would catch the barrier just fine. He wanted to tell his father that he, his son, would be okay in the Navy; give him some slack. Yes, he had needed to experience this. He felt good.

“Good lineup.”

“Four hundred pounds fuel.”

“You’re left.”

“Good lineup.”

“Power.”

“Nose up—nose up—POWER!”

Thirty thousand pounds of airframe hurtled into the net stretched above the wire and the wire strained and the tail rose and the whole mass skidded down the deck to the limit of the wire’s extension and the tail slapped down with a final crack, and alpha golf 707 came to a dead stop.

Christine was home.

She snarled. She still had enough fuel to bitch with.

Rafehausen had put her down with as little damage as could be hoped for. Christine would fly again, even though most barrier survivors are scrap from the moment the net is pulled off.

The LSO had sweated through the calls and brought this bird home. Now, he drawled to the waiting ship:

“Beautiful landing, American flyboy. Welcome aboard USS Franklin D. Roosevelt—your home away from home.”

It was the first hint Alan had that they were on the wrong boat.

He understood perfectly when Rafe’s shaking voice whispered over the intercom, “Nobody say a fucking word to me. Not a fucking word!”

Alan was not feeling too well himself. The coolness of moments before had vanished, leaving, not airsickness, but real nausea. He had been wrong: Death had been waiting on the boat, grinning at Christine as she roared by, throwing sparks like a welder’s torch. Catch you next time, Death had signaled. Or the time after. Or sometime.

Reality check.

Alan breathed in the stinking air and tried to focus on something else. The wrong boat. That meant—his father’s boat. He had just landed on his father’s carrier. That brought him to. He felt the old reaction—welcomed it as relief from the aftershock of the close call—the old shortness of breath and slight dread. Perhaps it was simply expecting too much of every meeting, or perhaps it was fearing that too much was expected of him. Always, always when he was preparing to meet his father in all those years they had lived apart, there had been this reaction.

So he sat in the net-wrapped plane, numbly watching figures in red and orange as they hustled to clear the flight deck for incoming CAP craft, scuttling around Christine like ants servicing the queen.

He loved his father. He feared his father. Where was the balance between those things?

And Alan Craik, thinking only of himself and his father, did not guess, could not guess, that a man who would change his life was out there among the hurrying red jerseys.

3
0719 Zulu. Brussels.

In a stall of a men’s room in the Brussels airport, the small man stood over the toilet, a cigarette lighter in one hand and the white card in the other. Most days of his adult life, he had gone through this little ceremony, burning the day’s notes to himself, a secret act of defiance and a terrible act of hubris—”wanting to be caught,” the psychologists (whom he despised) would have said. They would have been quite wrong. No part of him, physical or mental, wanted to be caught. The very idea made him smile.

He looked down the list. Two minus signs. He was sorry to have lost them; he would have much preferred those signs to be pluses. The minus signs were like defeats. But they would not discourage him. Depression came more easily with fatigue; he knew himself that well. Still—He flicked the lighter and touched the flame to the corner of the card. As the flame spread toward his fingers he watched Bonner’s name and his question mark disappear, then dropped the burning paper to the water and flushed.

He wished that the question surrounding Bonner could be so easily disposed of. Bonner, to his profound regret, was out of his reach just then.

He pulled himself up and marched to a ticket counter and bought a seat on a flight to Naples.

0723 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

Alan stepped down to the flight deck and wavered, rubber-legged. He made himself cross toward the catwalk as if he felt cool and strong, not wanting anybody to see his weakness. Craw came behind him. Alan had already lost track of Rafe and Narc; when had they got out of the plane? He took his helmet off—the plain helmet of a beginner, without nickname or logo. You had to earn the boastful, joking graphics that aircrew lavished on their helmets. He had no idea what he would use, if he was ever allowed. He could imagine what Rafe would choose for him—a winged asshole?

He was cold, but the fine, stinging spray of rain was a relief, the clean sea air a tonic after the aircraft. Moving at twenty knots, the carrier made a wind that seemed to blow him clean.

He turned, looked past the senior chief at Christine. She was already being moved to an elevator, one wing folded, her tires blown. Irrationally, he felt at that moment an uncomplicated affection for her.

Craw’s hand touched his shoulder. Alan jumped. “I appreciate what you did there, sir. Helping me.”

“I-uh—hey. How’re your hands?”

Craw held up palms shiny with burn ointment. “I got more grease on me than a slider.”

And they both laughed. They laughed because it was funny just then, laughed because they had survived and were alive to see another fireball rise over the Atlantic.

And Craw said, “You goin’ to do all right, sir.”

They grinned at each other across the divide that separates officer from enlisted, despite age, experience, knowledge of life and death.

“We gawt to clear outta here,” the senior chief said. “Aircraft incoming.”

They walked together down the nonskid catwalk toward the ready room, the debrief, the awful meatballs that sailors call “sliders,” supposedly so greasy that one will slide the length of a table with a minimal shove; toward this floating world of maleness, this tangle of stresses, traditions, affections, hidden feelings; walked toward it in a momentary but perfect companionship. At the door to the light lock, they hesitated, and Alan opened the door because he thought Craw’s burned hands wouldn’t let him do it. They exchanged a look, and Craw was gone.

Alan, the shock of the landing fading, realized that he had never felt so content.

And ready to meet his father. Somewhere on board, probably tomorrow.

He stepped through into the darkness of the light lock. The far door was just closing on Craw’s heels, the wedge of light folding to nothing. Alan, blind from the glare of the deck, was aware only of a bulk nearby before he was wrapped in an embrace.

“Welcome aboard, kiddo.”

“Dad.” He returned the embrace, glad of it, glad of the darkness that hid their embarrassment.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“My SDO woke me up. How’d you like the net? Fun, huh?”

They moved into the passage, Alan squinting at the brightness, chattering too fast. “I’ve got to do the debrief. You know, the new guy gets the dumb job? You look great, Dad. Yeah, what a ride—”

“I’ll walk along.”

His father was a commander, CO of an attack squadron of A-6s. He would be hard-pressed for sleep, but he had sacrificed it for these minutes in the dark hours of a morning to be with his son. He could not say so. He could only do it, make his being there stand in for any expression of emotion.

They had last seen each other three weeks before at the O club. That had been different. This, Alan realized, was the first time in an operational environment. It was a little like the moments with Craw—looking across a divide with new eyes, getting something new back. Yet they chatted of trivia. Everything was hidden.

Until, at the debrief door, his father grasped his shoulders. “Proud of you,” he said—and abruptly turned away.

On the flight deck, silence marked the end of the twelve-cycle flight day. The glare was turned off, and only disembodied blue flashlights pierced the dark, darting about as if searching for something—as if, perhaps, they sensed the traitor whose existence was not yet known, like hounds looking for a scent. They moved in silence, only the wind generated by the Roosevelt’s twenty-plus knots sounding where earlier jet engines had shattered the night.

Thirty-six inches below the flight deck, bunkrooms of snoring ensigns finally achieved real sleep, free from jet-blast deflectors and engines screaming for launch, free from the “THWACK-thud” of jets making the trap right over their heads.

Alan tumbled into an empty sack and was instantly asleep. He dreamed old dreams of examinations for which he was unprepared and woke at last still locked in their fear of failure.

In another part of the ship, Petty Officer First Class Sheldon Bonner stripped to his skivvies and lay back on his rack, an envelope in his left hand. It had already been opened, the letter inside already read. Yet, he took the paper out and read it again. He yawned. Dear Dad, it began. Unconsciously, Bonner smiled. He held the letter above him. Dear Dad, How are you doing? Everything here is A-OK, but I get tired of Navy schools. I bet you have an exciting time in the Med.

Bonner read it all through. He got paper and a ballpoint from his locker and lay down again, this time on his side, and began to write. Dear Donnie. Great to get your letter. I am thinking of that time we fished for trout in Idaho, remember, I bet you forgot. We had some great times, you bet. You do what your old man tells you and make the most of that school, your future is secure if you do good there. Now I am serious about this. I want you to make chief, super chief, unlike your old man, you got potential to do anything. Aim for the stars. He wondered if that was too much. No, he meant it. His kid could be anything. Anything!

0953 Zulu. Moscow.

In Moscow, a cold rain was falling. In the old KGB building, now the SVRR building (and called “the old KGB building” by everybody), Darya Ouspenskaya stared at her window, tracking the drops that streamed down it like tears. She muttered aloud, “Il pleut sur la ville comme il pleure dans mon coeur,” and smiled at herself. Down in the street, a few people hurried, shoulders hunched against the downpour. My poor Moscow, she thought. The city looked even dirtier in the rain.

Darya Ouspenskaya was overweight but still pretty, a jolly woman who radiated good humor. Men liked her, found her sexually attractive because her face seemed to promise that everything would be taken lightly; any mistakes or failures would be laughed away. She humored them all, slept with none. She was long since divorced from a man she hardly ever thought of any more. Her few sexual adventures were short-lived now, never allowed to be serious.

Her telephone rang. She picked it up with habitual distaste, an ancient dial phone that felt greasy no matter how much she bribed the babushka to sterilize it. Darya wanted a new telephone, green or gold, touchtone, something reeking of high tech and smartness.

“The Director will see you now,” a female voice said.

“At once.”

She avoided the lift, which might again be stopping only at every other floor, and walked up the two flights of broad stone stairs. Big muscles in her calves and thighs raised her; she enjoyed feeling them work. She wore clothes picked up in London, “the Raisa Look,” everybody now mad to imitate Gorbachev’s wife.

“Go right in,” the secretary said. She was younger, inexplicably severe-looking; Darya, by keeping her supplied with perfume and little favors, had overcome that severity and now got special bits of gossip from her, preferred access to her boss.

Director Yakoblov was sitting at his desk with his face down in a file, his bald spot pointed at her. He had a cold. He breathed heavily and blew his nose into a tissue and swore. A plastic bag at his feet was half filled with soiled tissues.

“What have you got?” he said.

“You should be in bed,” she said; between them, such words had no sexual connotation.

“Rotten, simply rotten,” he said. “But if I stayed home, they’d think I wasn’t indispensable, and then you’d have my job. What have you got?”

“Efremov.”

He groaned.

“You directed me to look into his disappearance.”

“I know what I did! My God, Ouspenskaya—!” He clutched his forehead. “Aaah! I need antibiotics, they give me decongestants! Well?”

“He seems to be gone. His apartment has not been visited in three days. I ordered an entry; I have the report, but the essence is his clothes and so on are there, as is money, keys, even a passport.” She paused.

“Go on, go on.” He blew his nose.

“He has a second flat near the Gorki statue, under the name Platonov. Internal Security had it wired; I suspect he knew all that. Not a beginner, after all. He had a woman there sometimes, always the same. A little delicate.”

The Director looked at her over another white tissue.

“The daughter of Malenkov the gangster. We assume the other listening devices were his.”

He blew his nose. “Continue.”

“I interviewed her myself. She is terrified of her father. She is married to one of his boys; one or the other will kill her if they find out about Efremov, she says. As if Papa didn’t already know. She hasn’t seen him in—” she checked her notes “—ten days. She was to meet him at the flat three days ago but he didn’t appear. That checks out with Internal’s records—she was there for an hour alone, then left. Anyway, she doesn’t know where he is, she says, has no plans to meet him in some other place, and so on and so on.”

“You believe her?”

“Oh, yes. She’s a scared little thing. I threatened her a bit, she almost fainted. She needs to be questioned by somebody with more time than I have, really go over everything, her memory might turn up a clue. But we’d have to promise her something good—protection from her husband, maybe. Maybe her father, as well.”

He waved a tissue.

She looked up at him. He stopped sniffling and stared back. “I’ve had a look at his computer files. Surprisingly—mm—bland. I make no judgments, as you know, but—if I were the famous Sherlock Holmes, I would say they are significant for the fact that they are so insignificant.”

“Well, after all, his agents are run by underlings. He has how many agents?”

“He claims eighty.”

The Director looked up. “‘Claims’?”

Ouspenskaya, with a tiny shrug, said, “We pay for eighty; I am not entirely convinced that I see the files for eighty.”

The Director nodded, gloomy, as if his worst fears about her cynicism were confirmed.

“No evidence in his shredder or the burn box. By that, I mean only that there is no indication that this was a man preparing to leave. Everything points rather to a man who, mm, is not with us against his will.”

She looked, waited. The Director opened a drawer and took out a nasal spray, stuck it up one nostril and shut the other with a finger. “Continue,” he said. He sprayed.

“His computer may have been purged of some files. It’s hard to say, impossible for me, in fact; I’m not an expert. That computer, as I’ve told you a thousand times, is an antique and not to be trusted. American secretaries have better computers on their desks than you and I have in our—” He was waving his free hand at her, meaning Shut up, shut up, I’ve heard it over and over. “Well. The sum and substance is that Efremov has disappeared and I’ve found no evidence of anything. He’s gone. Kaput. Disappeared. What is it the British say? ‘Done a bunk’?”

“‘Taken a powder,’ the Americans say. A colloquialism I don’t understand at all.”

“Face powder? Or, sleeping draughts used to be called powders. Quite nonsensical.”

The Director threw himself back so hard that his chair springs made a catlike noise; he sniffed, then worked his nose up and down. “Efremov,” he said. “I like him. I trust him. Don’t you trust him?”

“He is devoted to his work.” She knew that she would gain no advantage with this man by claiming to have suspicions. In fact, she was afraid of Efremov and stayed away from him.

“All right. What are your suspicions?”

“Director! You hurt my feelings. Why must I have suspicions?”

He cleared his throat, like a man preparing to spit. “Between ourselves,” he said, “I admire your suspicious nature. Tell me what you think. I won’t necessarily believe you.”

She stared at the distant window. “I surprise myself by having no suspicions. Odd. I think I don’t know enough yet. But that makes me suspicious, because I have been looking into the man’s life for two days and it is all—bland. Like the creation of a perfect bureaucrat. And why not? Colonel Efremov has a splendid record, some might say brilliant; he has no ‘past,’ no quirks, no secret life except the girlfriend. Still—” Her voice trailed off. “He has decentralized his work over the past four years. One might say it is an example of perestroika. Or one might say it is the opposite—obfuscation. He has divided his agents into somewhat irregular groups for purposes of administration and created his own sub-sections to handle them. Nothing wrong, exactly, but—he has followed the CIA model of creating false entities, companies on the new free-market model, and using them to mask his organizations. Nothing wrong, but they are a little difficult to track.”

“Accountability?” the Director said hoarsely.

“Financing, to be sure.”

“False agents?” The Director sounded heart-broken.

“I have no evidence of such a thing. But—!” She stood up. “Suppose the girl’s gangster father learned something, maybe from her, maybe with his taps, maybe somewhere else—let’s say that he learned that his daughter’s KGB colonel—sorry, SVRR colonel—was making money from his elaborate administrative structure. Let us just say he learned that we are paying for agents who don’t exist. He confronts Efremov. He says, ‘Do such-and-such for me, or I tell your bosses.’”

“‘Such-and-such’?”

“Oh—information about KGB—SVRR—penetration of foreign businesses, or a lever on contracts, or—my God, you know how illegal money is made as well as I!”

The Director blew his nose. “Proceed.”

“And Efremov says no, or he tries to exercise some power of his own, and Papa has him killed. Or, another scenario, Efremov kills himself!”

“Rather Lermontov, that.”

“I agree. Or he leaves the country.”

The Director rubbed his already red eyes. “Or he could be lying in a stalled car in the snow beside a back road he took by mistake on the way to his dacha.” He looked at her between his fingers. “We mustn’t overlook the accidental.” He studied her face. “There’s something more. Come on.”

She shook her head vigorously; her brown hair bounced back and forth. “Only an anomaly. Nine months ago, he set up another of his entities to support four agents. For him, perfectly normal procedure—except that all his other entities support twelve to fifteen agents.”

“That doesn’t seem much to me.”

“His best four agents. You know how he liked to brag—keeping a secret and bragging at the same time. Like those note cards he always had in his pocket, writing down the most important things he was doing that day: something a rank beginner would know better than to do. He would brag of something that one of his agents had brought him, then cover his tracks by hiding the nationality or some such. In fact he was deliberately transparent about some things—their jobs, for example. I knew that he’d an agent who was on the maintenance staff at NATO in Brussels, for example. Also somebody in the American military. Those and two others had been set up in this new entity.”

“The others?”

She shook her head. “One I think was a woman. That’s all I can tell at this point in time. If you’d allow me some expert support to go into his computer—”

He shook his head. “Keep it in the house.” He spat into his tissue and looked at the result. “Maybe he’ll turn up. Maybe he’s just sulking someplace. Maybe he’s dead.” The contents of the tissue made him even gloomier. “Maybe it’s we who are dead, hmm? Moscow, the city of the dead? I would have been reprimanded for treason for saying that once. Now, I wish there was somebody to reprimand me.”

1038 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

He reported to a lieutenant commander in the inboard intel center. Peretz was a slouching, slightly bald man his father’s age who had sick-looking circles under his eyes and a constant air of gloom.

“You Mick Craik’s son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Siddown, siddown. Your father and I go way back. In fact, the first squadron I served with.” Peretz wore glasses and used them like an academic, looking over the tops or pointing them for emphasis. Now, he pulled them down his nose and stared at Alan. “I understand you fly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Gonna stay with it?”

“I want to.”

Peretz made a face, half-grotesque; his gloom was a mask for a sardonic sense of humor, Alan realized. He pushed his glasses up. “What do the flyboys call you?”

“Spy.”

“Could be worse. ‘Dickhead’ is a favorite. You get along?”

“I think so.”

Peretz nodded, a rapid head movement that made his shoulders bob. Looking at his hands, he said, “You know the other battle group found us last night.”

“Oh, shit.”

Peretz looked up at him. His eyes were shrewd and perhaps amused. “Did you do a wide radar sweep just before you made the stack last night?”

Alan flushed. “We weren’t in EMCON.”

“JFK thought somebody found them last night. They were sure we’d be on them.” He looked up from his fingers. “No report was made.”

“No, sir.”

“You didn’t know you’d flashed them?”

Alan hesitated. Should he protect Rafe? He thought that Peretz was trying to teach him something, that this was between two intel officers, the flyers not part of it. He took a chance. “I caught two bananas south of Pico and ID’d one as the Kennedy. Was I right?”

Peretz nodded. He seemed fascinated by his own fingertips, even sniffed them from time to time. “How come you didn’t give us a blast?”

“Are we in trouble over this?”

“We? You mean, you and your pilot? Naw. This is between Kennedy’s 10 and me and the gatepost.”

“I thought the admiral would be pissed.”

“He is. But you’re too young to feed to an admiral. He wouldn’t get any satisfaction from reaming you out; admirals want commanders or higher.” Peretz grinned at his hands. “A Brit wrote after World War II that flag officers are best thought of as old ladies who need very careful handling.” He raised his eyebrows and glanced at Alan. “Keep it in mind.”

“I didn’t report it because my mission commander—let’s say he ruled the mission was over.”

Peretz swung forward, hands on knees. “Okay. Learning time. You had important information and you didn’t do with it what you’re supposed to. It’s no good saying to yourself it’s his call and he’ll take the heat. You going to do this in a combat situation? You’re an intelligence officer—you have a responsibility. I don’t care how much you like to fly! Information, information! You let us down. You let yourself down.” He leaned back. “And I’d have done the same thing.” He smiled. “You must be pretty good with that TACCO rig, to pick them up like that.”

“It was iffy.”

Peretz nodded. “As a TACCO, next time let the intelligence officer in you decide whether the iffy stuff is worth following up. Okay? End of lecture.” He waved a hand. “Nobody gets in trouble over this one.” He did the same rapid head-nod. “You want to belong. Am I right? You want to be one of the boys. Aviators are a funny lot.” He chuckled. “I coach my daughter’s soccer team. All girls. They taught me a lot about aviators. I began to see aviators completely differently once I learned to look at them as a girls’ soccer team.”

Alan thought he was supposed to laugh, did, felt like a traitor to his mates, and said, “Girls?”

“Yeah. Think about it. Lots of nervous laughter. Very cliquey. Full of insecurity. Always clustering around the most popular girl—that is, the guy with the most clout with the skipper, or the best landing grades. Love gossip. Get in corners and giggle together. Share secrets a lot—snicker, snicker. Try it. It might make you worry less about being an 10.”

He was, Alan thought, a disappointed man who had found a little fantasy to cover his own failure. Granted, being a Jewish 10 would be even harder than being Alan Craik; and he guessed that Peretz came across to flyers as a weird nerd, to boot. Still, the idea of his squadron as a cabal of prepubescent girls had its appeal. He changed the subject by saying, “How do I get back to my ship?”

“You don’t. Not till we hit the first liberty port. They’re cutting orders for you to stay here with me until then.” He saw Alan’s stricken face. “This is important! You’re going to do a lieutenant’s job—learn the joint-ops template and brief it on your boat. You brief the squadron commanders, air wing, ship’s captain, the works. I would have had to pull somebody over here from your boat, otherwise.”

Alan thought of the flying hours missed. That, he realized, was precisely what Peretz had so gently read him out for—thinking more of the flying than his real job.

“Sounds good.” Did he mean that?

He found his father in his squadron’s ready room. His father grabbed him, held on to his arm to keep him from escaping while he explained something to two other officers. They moved into the passage, and then his father continued to carry on brief exchanges with passing men while he talked to Alan. His father seemed to know everybody, so that every few words he was interrupting himself with, “Hey, Jack,” “George, how’re they hanging this morning?” “Smoker, good to see you—” His eyes flicked constantly away from Alan, up and down the passage, as if he were a politician looking for constituents. Perhaps he was; being a squadron commander has its political side.

“So,” he said, “you get some sleep? Hiya, Gomer.”

“I was wiped.”

“Bill. I hear you’re going to be here a few days. Kincaid, I want a report on Florio’s mother—if it’s cancer, give him compassionate. Yeah, today. You meet B ernie Peretz?”

“Yeah, I—”

“Hey, Deek, stand by, man, I need to talk to you. What’ja think?”

“I liked him.”

“You did. Hey, Mac. Yeah, Bernie’s an okay guy. Uh—he’s getting out, you know.” His father said that in a faint tone of warning, meaning—what? That he shouldn’t take Peretz too seriously? Shouldn’t use him as a model?

“Why’s he getting out?”

“Passed over for commander. Phil, you guys stank yesterday. This isn’t the Mongolian Navy we ‘re running here. We care, get me? He didn’t make the cut. Bernie’s okay, but—he likes to stay home with the kids and the dog. He’s good at what he does, though—learn what you can from him. Word to the wise: do good on this one, it’s all money in the bank. You do these briefings, your name gets around—it’s all part of the profession.”

“You always used to tell me that doing my best was all that mattered.”

Why had he said that? Already, he had put that prickly hedge between them. Let him say whatever he wants, an inner voice cautioned. But too late.

“Doing your best and having other people know it. You gotta be practical, kiddo. Something you’re not very good at—they don’t teach it in the ivory tower, right?”

Don’t rise to it, the inner voice said. This is as hard for him as for you. It was the old opposition. Style. Culture.

His father said, “Anyway, we’ll have a look at Naples together, okay?”

“Palma.”

“Your boat’s going to Palma; we’re making liberty at Naples. You’re on this boat, kid.”

“Oh, God! Dad, Kim’s meeting me at Palma!”

“Kim? The redhead with the big gazumbahs I met at Shakey’s with you?”

And he lost it. “Goddamit, Dad—!”

“Oh, sorry—I meant to say, ‘the young lady with the enormous intellect.’ Snake—Jackson, hey—”

He yanked his arm away. “Dad, Kim and I are practically engaged!”

His father gave him a strange look. His eyes stopped flicking up and down the passage. He took plenty of time, perhaps thinking of something and then deciding to say something else. “Like father, like son, huh?”

“You said it; I didn’t.” His father’s record with women was abysmal: he had been married twice, both failures, the first to Alan’s mother, the second to a fleshy woman named Thelma who had had huge breasts and the brain of an ant, although she had been smart enough to get out after eight months. Alan almost said, When I get married, I mean to stay that way, but he bit the words off. Instead, forcing himself to be calmer, he said, “You’re talking about somebody you don’t know anything about,” and his cheeks flamed.

His father made a face. “Sorry, she looked like Son of Thelma to me. Give me her address, I’ll get a message to her you’ll be in Naples.” Again, he looked at Alan strangely. “I think there’s a lot I don’t know about you all of a sudden.”

1311 Zulu. Langley, Virginia.

George Shreed heaved himself off his metal canes and into his chair, propping the canes against the desk, supported on a decorative turning that was faintly worn from years of such use. His shock of gray hair stood up on his head, rather startling, almost as if he had had it styled that way, looking not unlike the Nobel winner Samuel Beckett. He lit a cigarette and turned to the morning book—pages of already digested and analyzed intelligence, winnowed, prioritized, emphasized, and most of it crap, he thought. He flipped pages. One item caught his eye; unthinkingly, he put a little tick next to it. Moscow. Massacre in office building. At least thirty dead in military-style attack. Probable organized cime but target not clear. Spetsnaz-style execution of aged security guard. Unconfirmed dummy company. He looked back a page, then ahead, jumped to the Russian and area forecast section and again did not find what he wanted. “Sally!” he said harshly, pressing down a button. “We had a Not Seen on Yuri Efremov a couple days ago, Moscow. Get some details.” He returned to his briefing book.

1323 Zulu. Moscow.

The stink of fire and chemicals lay in the damp air even after the fire was out. A police detective, hands plunged into the pockets of his cheap ski jacket, stared gloomily at the building’s doorway as another body bag came down.

“Thirty-one,” the cop next to him said.

“How do you know it’s thirty-one? You’ve put the pieces together, have you?”

“Thirty-one bags.”

“Imbecile.” He crossed the wet street and pushed through the firemen. As an investigation, this was going to be a joke. What the firemen hadn’t bitched up, the bomb squad had. They’d be a week just working out how many dead they had.

“Hey, sir, that’s where they found the old man.” A plainclothes cop he knew pointed toward the floor near the far wall. “Back of the head, close range—typical stuff.”

Typical, my ass, he thought, it didn’t get to be typical until fucking Gorbachev showed up with his freedom and his shit. Aloud, he said, “Ex-mil.”

“Yes, sir.”

The detective trusted the man, knew him to be more or less honest, perceptive when he wasn’t too lazy to think. “So?” he said, bobbing his head toward the upstairs. Water, he saw, had spilled down the stairs and was leaking through the ceiling. Broken pipes.

“I seen it ten times in the last few years. You know. Ex-mil for hire, they’re fucking good at it, fucking Rambos. It’s mafia.” He had been talking to people in the building and could give a quick summary of what was up there—the big room with thin partitions, computers, lots of telephones, some kind of high-tech business. “So they wouldn’t pay off the gangsters, they got hit,” he said with a shrug.

“Computers? Western money?”

“I dunno. This is just what the people in the building say.”

It didn’t click for him. He was slower to reach conclusions but reached sounder ones when he did; maybe that’s why he was a detective. “Let’s have a look,” he said.

“Fucking mess up there.”

“No kidding.” He started up the stairs, keeping near the wall where there was less water.

1441 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

Peretz had nothing for him yet, and he wandered down to the JO wardroom for lack of anything to do. Carriers are carriers, your own or somebody else’s: a lot of hours to kill. He wished he had work, or—He thought of Kim.

Narc was sitting alone at a table. Heading for him, Alan remembered Peretz’s fantasy about the girls’ team; he tried it here. Five pilots were laughing too loud a few feet away; another pair were muttering together with their heads close. Raise the pitch of the laughter, blur your eyes and give them longer hair—my god, it might work! He thought of Peretz’s edged description: insecurity, cliquishness, rivalry …

“Hey, Narc.”

“You know we’re gonna be on this boat for five fucking days?”

“I’m fine, thanks; how nice of you to ask. And how are you this morning?”

“I’m pissed off. I don’t have a dad to entertain me while I’m aboard, okay?”

“Okay, okay—sorry. Hey, I haven’t seen Rafe.”

Narc snorted. “Our pilot and senior chief have already left. Nice, huh? Skipper pulled them back the first chopper they could get. Isn’t that swell! They go, I stay.”

Alan, despite himself, tuned out the content, listened only to the tone; was this Peretz’s jealousy, preadolescent gossip? He was wondering if Narc could make it as an eleven-year-old girl when Narc leaned forward and said, “I think I’m a better pilot than Rafe—don’t you?”

“Rafe’s pretty good,” Alan muttered. He was trying to keep from chuckling, and Peretz’s imagery came to him. He let Narc jabber on; inside his own head he was crushing the image of the young girls. Such a petty revenge might be fine for a man who was leaving the Navy; it could only get Alan into trouble. He put the notion aside, thought instead of his father’s comments about his girl.

“Absolutely,” he said. That was all Narc demanded of him—sympathetic sounds.

“Right.”

His father had no right to speak to him like that, he thought, then saw that of course he had; what was galling was that it was such a cheap shot, especially from him. Alan had once heard his father referred to as “Mattress Mick,” knew he was a womanizer.

“You bet,” he said to Narc’s vaguely heard complaints.

He felt Narc actually liking him, warming to his support. “I mean,” Narc was saying, “I don’t take anything away from the guy; he put Christine into the net and didn’t total her. Good job. I give the fucker his due. But goddam it, it all started with him trying to land on the wrong boat. Jesus H. Christ! Is that first-class flying? Is it?”

“Well—”

“Right! And what’s his punishment? Do you know what his punishment is? Huh?”

“What?”

“He’s gotta buy a beer for everybody who repaints Christine. Huh? Get it?”

Alan didn’t get it. He supposed somebody would paint out the damage to Christine’s facelift—so what?

“Look, Spy, this is how it goes. When you put a plane on the wrong carrier and it needs work, they repaint it, see, with their logo and their markings. In effect, it’s a plane from this carrier’s S-3 squadron now. Get it? So then it gets sent home to our carrier and it has to be repainted again with our logo and our marks. See? Well, every officer and EM in the squadron will want a hand on a spraygun to say he helped, see, so Rafe has to buy beer for the squadron. Well, what the hell is that? A guy puts a plane down on the wrong boat and we wind up with a fucking beer party. Is that right?”

Narc was outraged. He was not the brightest guy ever to join the Navy, but he was not far from wrong in believing he had been born to fly. He wanted to be an astronaut. He took it all very seriously.

“Maybe we could reintroduce flogging,” Alan made the mistake of saying.

Narc stared at him, finally got it, said, “Your human interaction is piss-poor, did anybody ever tell you that? I’m saying this for your own good. You don’t get along.”

“Jeez, I thought I was loveable.”

“See? Always destructive digs. Now, my guess is you were never on a sports team. Am I right?”

“Actually, I was.”

Narc’s eyes narrowed. “What team?”

“Wrestling.”

“Wrestling! You wrestled?” Narc looked shocked. “Were you any good?”

Had he been any good? Mostly, he’d been a skinny kid too small for his age who’d spent his adolescence doing the things he most feared because he thought he was a coward—going in the winter without a coat, swimming across a lake at night, wrestling. He’d hated it, and so it had become even more important to do it. Had he been any good? “Nah,” he said.

For three years, he had learned all the holds, the takedowns and the escapes; he got so good at them that the coach had him teaching other wrestlers. But he was physically weak, and he hardly ever won a match. Then, in the summer after his junior year, he put on a spurt of growth and grew right into the weight class of the team’s best wrestler, the state runner-up. He never got into a match again, was a training partner for the good one. At the season’s end, the coach gave him a letter anyway, something he had desperately wanted, and that night he took it down to the Iowa River and dropped it in, because it was part of his code then that real rewards didn’t come for trying hard; they came for succeeding.

“I don’t see you wrestling,” Narc said.

Alan smiled at him. “Ever try it?”

“Jesus, no. The dumbest guys I ever knew were wrestlers.” Clearly, Alan had confused him. “Do it in college?”

Alan shook his head, laughing now. “I made sure I picked a college that didn’t have a wrestling team.” In fact, he’d picked a college that had no teams at all, only intramural sports. He had conducted his life like that in those days, with a rigid adolescent morality, rules, abrupt changes of direction. Ironically, he had put on bulk and muscle his first year in college and would then have been the wrestler he had wanted to be. He hadn’t realized that until, his second week in the squadron, he had been packed off to be the guinea pig for a new self-defense course put on by the Marines at Quantico. He had loved it, learned a lot about street-fighting, and had told the skipper it was great. Later, other officers, coming back limping and bruised, had accused him of being a practical joker.

“I played soccer and baseball,” Narc said, his tone indicating that these were real sports and that they gave him an authority Alan lacked. Narc went on to explain his theory of human interaction based on team experience. He ended by saying, “No offense, Craik, but the way I read it, you’re a loner, do you get my meaning?”

“You mean I’m a loner.”

“That’s right.”

“Wrestlers get like that. Four years in somebody else’s armpit, you want a little space.”

“You need to learn to interact. I bet you weren’t in a fraternity.”

“You’re right.”

“See? That’s where you really learn in college. Human skills. I paid a lot of attention to that side of it. You ever notice how I handle Rafe, for example?”

Alan hadn’t, but he said, “Mmmm,” in an appreciative way.

“That’s my point. You understand what I’m saying? You’re in his face all the time—like that shit with the BG and the radar. You made it sound like he had to do it because it was some big moral thing. I’d have made it a game, a team thing. See, it’s really a kind of management thing. Management skills. That’s what sports are all about. I expect to be an astronaut, right? That’s a team effort all the way. I’ll be way ahead in that department.”

“Afraid I’m a little late for a sports team.”

“Never too late to improve yourself. That’s one of my beliefs. I have a book I’d like you to read. Will you read it?”

Alan was surprised that Narc read any books at all. He said that of course he’d read it.

“It’ll change your life.”

Alan wondered if he wanted his life changed. That brought him somehow back to his father, then to a question as to whether all the changes he had made had simply been tacking back and forth across the unchangeable fact of being Mick Craik’s kid.

0420 Zulu. Langley, Virginia.

A bored clerk watched the low-level traffic feed in, now and then routing a message to file or analysis. Most of it, she knew, ended up somewhere in the attic of a mainframe computer, bytes on a chip that would be dust-covered from neglect if dust were allowed there. She yawned. Her eyes stung with fatigue. She sipped cold coffee.

Somebody had got herself murdered in Amsterdam. Big deal, she thought, you should live in DC. Hey, the somebody was a possible agent. She looked at the clock. Oh, Christ, she thought, four hours to go yet! A woman in Amsterdam. Yuck. Oh, gross. It made her slightly sick—a pregnant woman killed with a knife. Who does these things? “Lover of assistant naval attaché, Turkish mission.” That was it? One murder, one pair of hotpants. Big deal. She routed it toward the back burner.

16–19 March 1990. Mid-Atlantic.

Peretz was a born teacher. Alan learned more from him in four days, he thought, than he had in months of Navy schools. Peretz was crippled by a cynical wit, a submerged though very real arrogance. Yet he loved intelligence.

Once, in those four days, Alan said to him, “HUMINT’s a dying craft.” He had learned that in intelligence school: HUMINT—human intelligence, “spies,” was history; the future belonged to technology.

“Should I write that down?” Peretz had said. He had made this joke several times, pretending that Alan had said something so important it should be kept for posterity. “Jeez, I wish I had pen and paper. Maybe I can just commit it to memory. Now, how did it go? ‘HUMINT’s a dying craft.’ Boy, that’s really beautifully put.”

“Okay, you don’t agree.”

“Not me, sonny. It’s folks like the KGB—sorry, the SVRR. You think they have seven hundred thousand employees because they believe HUMINT’s a dead issue?”

“And look where they are. They lost. It’s over.”

“Communism lost, so HUMINT’s a dead issue. I think I missed a logical connection there someplace. Does your mind always work that way?”

Alan repeated to him some of the wisdom that he had learned in intelligence school, and Peretz laughed out loud at him. “Oh, to be young again!” he said. “Look, Al—” He had taken to calling him “Al,” a name he had hardly heard since high school. “—satellites are wonderful, spy planes are superb, NSA is the greatest organization of its kind in the world. But without the guy on the spot, they’re just fodder for the bean-counters. You need both, SIGINT and HUMINT. Americans love technology; for one thing, it’s expensive, and we trust things that cost a lot. Anything as cheap as a spy is immediately suspect to us. But you can really get hurt by old-fashioned human intelligence. How do you think the Soviets got the atomic bomb?”

“Forgive me, but I think your example says it all. That was more than forty years ago.” Alan chuckled; he knew Peretz well enough by then to be able to say, “Come on—spies?”

“Al, right now you’re in love with your computer and your radar. That’s fine. But I keep trying to tell you, you’re an intelligence officer. Be intelligent.” Peretz saw his skepticism. He sighed. “My greatest fear is, somebody’s going to plant an agent on me and I’ll be the unwitting means for some two-bit country to learn something that will hurt us—South Africa. France. Israel. One of the Arab states. You think I’m living in the past. Wrong end of the stick, chum: I’m living in the future. You wait until low-tech countries start going after our shit. You’ll see how important HUMINT is, in spades.” He shrugged. “Okay, so you need to grow up some. Come on, I’ll buy you a slider while you’re aging.”

They worked late together one day, running the new template through its paces. Alan knew he was good at it, had even proposed an improvement that Peretz fastened on to. Now, pleased with themselves, at ease with each other, they sipped cold coffee in the intelligence spaces, feet up.

“You know this is my last tour,” Peretz said.

Alan tried to think of a politic thing to say.

“Your dad told you I’m out, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sir.”

Peretz began to play with his fingers. “I could give you a lot of reasons why. They’re on my fitreps, right? But, between you and me—let me tell you this, because I see in you another … guy who might have to make the same choices. I wouldn’t make the sacriflce. You understand what I mean?” He made a face, sighed. “I wouldn’t make the sacrifice. Of my doubts, of my jokes, of my family. Of myself. What I mean is, if you stay in—there’s a cost.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to pay it.” He looked at Alan. “You sure you want to pay it?”

He wasn’t sure at all. He didn’t yet know Peretz well enough to say what he really feared: I’m only here until I prove something to my dad.

The last morning, Alan went to say goodbye. They were anchored in the Bay of Naples. Alan was excited, mostly about the imminent meeting with his girl, an imminence of sex that was so powerful he was sure he smelled of it. Sailors and women, oh boy—it was all true!

“I’m on my way, sir.”

“Hey, it’s been good. Your dad’s a lucky guy. Listen—” He held Alan’s arm. “Stay in touch. I mean that.”

“I will.”

And he would. His father wouldn’t approve, but he would stay in touch with Peretz.

Alan ran his father down in the squadron ready room. They shook hands, neither moving to an embrace because other men were nearby. The distance that had opened between them had not been closed, and Alan found himself dodging the suggestion that they get together in Naples.

He would think later of the time thrown away, time they might have had together, valuable only when it was too late.

4
20 March 1990. 0648 Zulu. Naples.

It was a day of the kind they make tourist brochures about, the bay deep blue and sparkling with the sun; toward Capri, the water looked greener, and the boats heading for the island trailed crisp, white wakes. In the other direction, Vesuvius seemed unthreatening behind a thick rim of beachfront development.

Petty Officer First Class Sheldon Bonner was not impressed. He liked Vesuvius well enough—enjoyed checking it out each time a sea tour brought him here—but “See Naples and Die” sounded stupid to him. The volcano looked a little dimmer today, he thought—more smog, more people down along the bay, more cruddy towns. But what he liked about Vesuvius was its lurking menace, and one day, he was sure, it would crack open again and pour ash and lava down on all the crud, and the bay would be cleansed and the air would be clear again. That would be worth seeing.

“Hey, Boner.”

A body joined him in the line. He didn’t even look back to see who it was. He grunted.

“Hey, Boner, gonna get some?”

“What else do you think we visit this shithole for?”

“Great pussy here, huh, Boner?”

“So-so.”

“You’re a fucking cynic, you know that, Boner? Your old lady know you got such high standards in pussy?”

Bonner carried on these conversations without thinking. Most talk, he had found, was done on autopilot. Men lived their real lives someplace else, hustling each other about what great sex they had, or what bad sex they had, how drunk they were last night, how they were mistreated, misunderstood, ripped off by the system; inside, they were thinking about other things entirely. He, for example, was thinking about money.

The line lurched forward and a speaker boomed out, “Boat away.” He gave his name, started down the ladder. Below, a boat was just moving away from the ship, the water opening between them a deeper, blackening blue. He descended into shade and felt cold.

Another boat nudged up and men began to file aboard. Bonner followed, clutching his toilet kit.

“You been this place before?” the E2 next to him said. Bonner remembered him from the hangar deck, a kid just out of high school.

“Lots.”

“It true they got a guy with a humongous prick at Pompeii?”

“Depends what your standard of comparison is.”

The kid laughed and turned red. He started to tell Bonner how he and his buddies were going to rent a car and drive to Pompeii and see the porn. Bonner tuned out. It was no good telling them that the train was a lot cheaper and easier. It was no good telling them the porn was stupid. It was no good telling them anything. They were young. Let them get ripped off by the Italian car rental agency, screwed by every gas station and trattoria; let them pay some ancient Guinea a hundred times what he was worth to be told a lot of bullshit about Pompeii. They were young and stupid—and in three to five years, they’d be out of the Navy or they’d be on their way to passing him by. They’d be headed for chief, and he’d still be a POI.

Sheldon Bonner, POl-For-Life. He thought of it as a title. He’d been busted twice, come back both times to POI, knew now he would never rise beyond it. The hotshots got their promotions on the backs of people like him, who made them look good. Were they grateful? Not a chance. They got the promotion, changed the uniform, hung out with their own kind and laughed at him behind his back. He knew. He’d had buddies who’d done that.

“Hey, you see that guy?” The kid nudged him. He was jerking his head toward a young man just coming aboard. Officer, Bonner thought, even in the civilian clothes. Behind him was a huge black man Bonner recognized as a super chief.

“What about him?”

“That’s my skipper’s son. Isn’t that amazing?”

He looked to be a perfectly normal, snot-nosed j.g., from all that Bonner could see. “What’s fucking amazing?”

“He’s the skipper’s son.”

“I’m not amazed.”

“He came in on that S-3 that took the net four nights ago. Maybe you didn’t hear.” He sounded suddenly apologetic, as if he had just realized that what was wonderful to his novice eyes bored the shit out of an old man like Bonner.

Bonner grunted. He didn’t much care about officers. They had almost nothing to do with him. He resented them, but this was simply a fact of life; everybody who wasn’t an officer resented them. But it was a given, part of their world, like the law of gravity. He watched as the super chief seemed to surround the young officer, protecting him. Old Dad had seen to that.

“Nice to have somebody to wipe your ass for you,” he said. The boy snickered. It wasn’t officers Bonner really resented, it was hotshot enlisted like this super chief, clearly younger than Bonner, already making better money. This one, he supposed, got there by being black.

“We’re the biggest minority in the fucking world,” Bonner said.

“Who?”

The boat separated itself from the carrier. The breeze freshened as soon as they swung away. Bonner shivered, then put his face up as they swung into sunlight. “White guys,” he muttered.

Did he really believe that? Bonner was never quite sure what he believed. Other people seemed to have fierce, clear beliefs, but he was aware only of large areas of dislike or grievance or distrust. The White Power guys, for example; they really believed all that, but when he talked to them, they sounded bananas. He knew guys in the Klan; they were out of it, too, he thought. No, what he hated about the Navy, about the world, was something so huge, so unexplainable, that you couldn’t make a cause of it. It was, finally, himself alone, and then this huge Other. That was the enemy. All that.

Not that he didn’t think that black guys got ahead these days because they were black. They did. Also women. But those were just parts of it, just little bits you could see of something huge and hidden.

What he was sure of, what he really knew, was that nobody ever got anything without being crooked somewhere. Find a rich guy, he’d show you a crook. The difference between people with money and people without money was that the ones with hadn’t got caught.

“Hey, man, is this Naples really as bad as they say?” the kid said. He looked nervous. He was like a young chicken, waiting to be plucked. He touched something in Bonner, maybe his attachment to his son.

Bonner began to talk to the kid about Naples. He gave him good advice, even though he knew it was wasted.

“Use a fucking condom. The whores here have AIDS for breakfast.”

Alan Craik let Senior Chief Petty Officer Gibbs shepherd him to the door of the Hilton. Gibbs apparently considered it his duty to keep watch over the skipper’s kid; this could have annoyed the hell out of Alan, but he decided not to let it.

“I think I can get through the front door by myself, Chief.”

Gibbs grinned. He was an enormous man, almost too big for the Navy’s specs. “Naples’s a dangerous place, Mr Craik.”

“Yeah, but the Hilton isn’t. Thanks for babysitting me.”

Gibbs grinned. Alan found the grin patronizing.

“Chief, I used to live in this town. Granted I was only nine. Kids learn a lot. Capisce?” Gibbs looked skeptical. “My dad was assigned to NATO here. I used to live—right up there.” He pointed up toward the Vomero, hardly visible now between the high-rises. He tried out the Italian he had been practicing in secret, the dimly remembered language of childhood. “Ero un’ piccolo scugnizz’ americano; ho vista tutto, tutto, d’accordo?” He made it a joke, laughed, although what he really remembered was that this was where his parents’ marriage had fallen apart. Not because of Naples, but because of the Navy.

“Okay, okay, Lieutenant. Take care, you hear?”

The big man ambled to the curb, then darted into the traffic and was across the street and gone.

Alan went through the doors and into the lobby that seemed familiar because it was international, therefore almost American, in the style of the American century. The woman at the concierge’s desk was stunning, bringing back all of Naples to him in an instant: not a girl, a woman, ample, a Sophia Loren face. Like the maid when he was nine, his friend, who had taught him Italian because she spoke no English. Teresa. Married to a little shrimp of a man who abused her.

“Per favore, signora.”

“Yes, sir?” She wasn’t going to let him speak Italian, he saw.

“A guest named Hoyt? Initial K?” Had Kim been able to get here?

“Twelve-thirty-one, sir. The telephone is right through there.”

His knees felt weak. He hadn’t seen her for six weeks. She had been a new experience for him before he sailed, a poor little rich girl with an appetite. Now, heading for the phones, he was thinking that maybe those nine days were a fiction; maybe he remembered them wrong. And then there was what his father had said about Kim—implying that she was stupid, a bimbo, an easy lay.

But she was here. He had sent a message, and she had jumped on a plane and come.

“Kim? Alan.”

“Oh, God! Come on up!” She giggled. “I’ve been shopping.”

When she opened her door, he saw what she’d been shopping for. They hardly managed to get the door closed before they were at each other.

PO1 Bonner picked his way around the pimps, dodged the plain-clothes cops, and gestured away the child pickpockets who were waiting for the carrier’s crew. He changed twenty dollars at the booth by the dock, causing a black-market money-changer (probably a cop) to assume a look of deep grievance; then he walked quickly up away from the water and headed into the first tobacco store.

“Camels. And a carty di telyphono.”

“Bene.” Bonner dropped fifteen thousand lire and the man counted the correct change. Bonner believed that every Italian would cheat him if given the chance, but he never gave them that chance, and he believed they knew it. It was part of his idea of himself that he had to project an image of toughness and knowingness, or the world would cheat him.

“Gratzy,” he said. The man only nodded.

Every minor crook and sex merchant in southern Italy would be there to greet a major American ship, he believed. The streets of Naples teemed with criminals, anyway, he was sure; today, their numbers would be multiplied—dwarves pretending to be children, mothers who had made cripples of their children to start them on a life of begging, men got up as nuns, transvestites there to lure naive kids into alleys. Bonner was walking through a city of tricksters. It was like this wherever he went; as a result, he never enjoyed himself.

He walked through a narrow street of shops and came out into the great piazza in front of the old Bourbon palace, then along the front of the palace. A few other sailors were already sightseeing there; these were the nerds, the serious ones, what Mattingly called the jerkoffs; one of them even had a guidebook and was reading to his buddy. Bonner walked along behind them. He passed the statues of the Bourbon kings, elevated above him in niches, below each one a stone rectangle and a kind of curb at the bottom. He passed the third of the four kings, and no one watching him could have said for sure whether he looked down and saw the chalked circle on the small curbstone, but when he had walked the length of the palace he turned, without changing his pace, and angled across the piazza, along in front of the curving porticoes that are a little like those of St Peter’s in Rome, and headed into the Via Chiaia. And nobody watching him could have known that seeing the chalked circle had him seething with resentment, for he seemed the same impassive man.

At the far end of the Via Chiaia is a vast old movie theater that was once a bomb shelter, cut into the soft tufa of the hillside. Inside, it is always cool and damp, and the place smells of mildew and cats. Yet it has the virtue of being open most of the day and night, so that men like Bonner can do their peculiar business there. (Other men and women do other, also peculiar, business there.)

Bonner bought a ticket and climbed to the second level. He passed the first men’s room he came to and went on much farther than seemed sensible in a movie patron, finally stopping at a smaller, almost hidden toilet far around toward the screen. There, he pissed, then lingered by a basin, combing his flat hair, his bag guarded between his feet, until a fat man in a dirty T-shirt went out. The only other occupant was in a stall, stinking the place worse than the mildew and the cats. Bonner bent quickly and felt under the second basin from the wall and removed something that he found at the back, slipped it into his pocket and went out. He did not stay to see the movie.

He checked into a hotel a block back from the tourist streets, a little place that was as plain and clean as a newly cut board. He had got it out of a tourist guide that promised to save you a hundred dollars a day. Bonner had lots of such guides; he made a little money on the ship renting them out—Naples, Monaco, Bahrain; it was well known that Bonner could tell you where to stay and where to eat for a minimum of ripoff.

He’d stayed here two other times, but they didn’t remember him. Why should they? he asked himself. Better that they didn’t.

The room was only big enough for the bed and a TV; the bathroom was no bigger than a closet, everything in it molded out of plastic, as if they’d just dropped the unit into place. Shower, no tub. No free shampoo or lotion or any of that shit. But clean.

Only when he was in the room with the door locked did he take out what he had collected in the men’s room. He unfolded a sheet of paper. His lips moved a little as he read the instructions written there. His anger showed in his face now. He read it again, then tore it into bits and slammed into the tiny bathroom and flung the pieces into the toilet.

The message had said to burn the paper when he was done, but everything in the bathroom was plastic and he was afraid of what the flame would do. And who the fuck was going to glue the pieces back together in the Naples sewer? “Kiss my ass,” he said aloud as he flushed the toilet.

Still, there was no question of his disobeying the message. He left his toilet kit on the sink and, seeing that he still had fifteen minutes, turned on the TV and watched an American horror film, dubbed into Italian. He’d seen it before, something about American kids saving the world from Dracula. In his experience, American kids couldn’t save a gnat’s ass from a spiderweb, but it probably sold movie tickets to tell them they were the hope of the world.

At five after ten, he went out.

Bonner knew the Galleria Umberto, but he’d forgotten how to get there, so he did some wandering and actually asked somebody for directions before he found it, then was astonished that he’d forgotten how easy it was to find. He went in, crossed the vast terrazzo floor under the vaulted glass ceiling and found a chair at one of the cafés there. A waiter waved him to come closer, but he shook his head and stayed out there in the middle. Not that he liked it out there. What he liked was a corner, or at least a wall that he could put his back to. But the instructions were to sit in the middle. So they could check him out, he knew. He knew all that.

The Galleria was like a church, he thought. Like one of those big, over-decorated Italian churches you’re supposed to fall down and vomit over because they’re old. Still, the Galleria had its good points: you could get a coffee or a beer in there and stay dry; you got the feeling of being outdoors because of the glass ceiling; you could see everybody who came and went.

“Coffee,” he said to the now angry waiter.

The waiter shot something at him in Italian. Of course the guy spoke English; they all had a little English, Bonner was sure. But he was making his point by speaking Italian because Bonner wouldn’t sit close to the kitchen so he didn’t have to carry anything so far. Instead, Bonner was sitting out here in Siberia, in the middle of the huge pavement.

“Can’t understand you, sorry,” Bonner said. “No capeesh.”

The waiter hissed something.

“Coffee, I want coffee. Just bring me coffee. Black, okay? A little sugar. What the hell. Sugar-o. Okay?”

The waiter spat some more words, of which Bonner understood “espresso.”

“Sure espresso, fine, molto benny. And some sugar-o, okay?”

Surprisingly, it came with two packets of sugar, and it was very good. The waiter had decided to dazzle him with service. He even brought the international Herald-Tribune. It was yesterday’s, but what the hell? The news was just like home—bullshit. Bush was doing this, the Democrats were doing that, the economy was up or down or sideways; what the hell?

Bonner sat there for more than half an hour. He read the newspaper a little, but mostly he sat there with his hands folded over his belly, looking around the Galleria. There were several floors to it, and each one had a kind of arcade and places for people to look down to the vast floor where he sat. They had something interesting to look at, he thought—a few people coming in one entrance and going out another, using the Galleria like a street; him, sitting there, obviously an American; more people drifting in and taking tables, morning break time. The Italians, he thought, spent most of their lives on breaks; no wonder they were broke.

At nine minutes after eleven, he crossed the floor and went out a different entrance, as he was supposed to do. There was a payphone. It rang.

“Across the street from you will be a taxi with flame painted on the hood. Get into it.”

And there it was.

And he did as he was told, cursing them for making him do it.

She sighed. “See Naples and die.”

“Jesus Christ!” Alan blew out his breath. “Wow.”

She held him tighter. “I love you so much.”

They lay silently together, timeless. “Say you love me,” she said. He whispered it into her hair. “You need practice,” she said. He could tell she was smiling. He raised his head and looked down at her. “It’s true,” he said. “I find it hard to say.”

“It gets easier with time.” She was still smiling. She kissed him. “Let’s just stay in bed all week and when we’re starved we’ll tell them to bring us champagne.”

“Not all week, Kim.” He hadn’t told her yet. He had thought there would be a good moment. “I’ve got to report to the boat day after tomorrow.”

“No, you don’t.” Something steely, also new, sounded in her voice.

“Yeah, I do. There’ll be a plane at Capodichino to take me. See, they started their liberty three days ago, while I was—”

“Well, you’ll just have to be real sick. Or tell them you’re doing charity work with an American woman who’ll die otherwise.”

He laughed. “Right! Compassionate leave. No, the Navy’s understanding, but not that understanding.”

“I won’t let you go.”

“Sweetie, they cut a set of orders for me. I have to get back to my own ship.” He kissed her. “Be good. Please.”

“I hate the Navy.” A tear trickled down from the corner of her right eye. “No, don’t—” She avoided another kiss and twisted aside under him, escaped and ran to the bathroom for a tissue, with which she started to dab her eyes.

Naked, Kimberley Hoyt looked as if she had been put together from male fantasies. She was very large where men wanted size, very small where she was supposed to be small. She had honey-amber hair that she wore long, and it blazed around her face like a sunburst. She was, in fact, the very woman most of the men of the carrier hoped to meet in Naples, and only Alan would.

He rolled over on his back. “Let’s have a great day together,” he said. “Kim? Okay?”

She burst into tears.

He went to her and they clung together, naked. When she was quiet, she said into his shoulder, “I think I don’t know you very well. It scares me, you going away and going away—I thought we’d have—time—”

“I have to.”

“Why? Why?” She flung her head back and stared at him. “Is it your father?”

“I signed on. I’m committed.”

She put a hand on his bare chest and began to move it back and forth, back and forth. She looked at the place as if she would learn something there. “I want you committed to me,” she said.

The taxi driver said nothing the whole trip, which wound around Naples in an apparently incoherent way, first up toward the Vomero, then down again, then well out toward Mergellina, then back. Bonner did not try to make sense of it. He supposed they were being followed to make sure that Bonner hadn’t brought a tag from the ship. He could have told them he hadn’t. He’d checked. He supposed the taxi driver was one of them, and that if Bonner didn’t check out he’d turn and he would have a silenced nine-millimeter and he’d go pfft! with it right into Bonner’s chest.

Oddly, most of what Bonner thought he knew about this business he had got from movies. If he’d known that the taxi driver was really only a taxi driver, he’d have been deeply confused.

Finally, the driver turned back up toward the Vomero, and, halfway up, pulled over to the side and motioned for Bonner to get out. It was a road, not a street; there was a weedy verge and some trash, but nothing close by like a house or a café. Bonner got out and stood there. He was going to ask if he was supposed to pay, when the driver reached back and slammed his door and drove off.

Bonner found himself on a curve, from which he could look down over the rooftops and terraces of several apartment buildings. The other way, across the road, there was a wall, and, above it and set well back, more apartments. It was an isolated place in the midst of the city. He looked down the road and saw nothing; glancing up, he saw, where the road curved out of sight, a small bulge of green and a bench.

“That’s it,” he muttered aloud. He began to trudge toward it. The sun was brutal. Bonner did not like this uphill walking in the heat. His anger bubbled up again like heartburn, and he told himself again that he’d really let them have it for calling him in again so soon. They’d had a deal! Well, he’d give them an earful. He rehearsed the sullen speech he had been making up during the long taxi ride.

The sounds of the city came up to him—motorcycles, horns, a couple of women shouting. The view opened wider as he walked; he could see the palace, the Castel’ dell’ Uovo, then the bay and the carrier riding out there at anchor. A civilian ferry was tied up next to it, taking on more liberty personnel. It looked like a toy next to the ship.

He walked on, sweating, hating this part of it, which always upset him and made his gut surge. He’d have a bad night, he was sure, up all the time with the crud. Nerves. He was breathing heavily, too, from the climb. At last he came to the bench, and he stood there, and up ahead about fifty yards he saw a car pulled over. The door opened and a man got out.

Bonner sat on the bench. There was a green metal railing around the little grassy bulge in the road. It was a wonderful viewpoint. He could see the carrier, Vesuvius, the castle, half the city, rolled out from his feet like a figured carpet. It was a great vantage point. But frankly, Bonner wouldn’t give you the sweat off one ball for the greatest vantage point in the world.

He turned and looked at the man. He didn’t try to hide his surprise. “Carl!” he muttered.

“A long time, Sheldon.” The man sat down on the bench. He was small, nondescript wore glasses that were only glasses and had no style. He was the only man in the world who called him “Sheldon.” His courtesy seemed based on a respect that was, itself, almost more valuable to Bonner than money. No one called him “Sheldon.”

“I didn’t know it would be you, Carl.” Already, he was apologizing, nervous; they always managed to do this to him, even though they must have had lots more to be nervous about than he did. How did they do that? It threw him off, to have Carl there. He had thought it would be some stranger.

“Please accept my apology for interrupting your liberty this way, Sheldon. I know how unfair it seems to you.”

“Oh, hey—that’s okay, Carl—” He had his speech rehearsed, even down to an explosion of anger. Now here Carl was, a really important man, apologizing for the whole thing.

“I wouldn’t call you out except for something very important, Sheldon. I want you to believe that.” Carl bent a little forward, his voice urgent. He was wearing warmups and a light nylon jacket and kept his right hand in the jacket pocket, but Sheldon didn’t think anything about that, because Carl was the man who had recruited him and was a very high official and must have dozens of people to do dirty work if there was any to be done. Carl, in fact, was one of the two people in the world whom Bonner trusted. The other was his son.

“There have been some changes,” the man called Carl said. He spoke in a flat, Americanized accent without any trace of his origins. “I have made a change. And so I wanted to share this with you and see if the change fits into your strategies. To see whether you would say yes or no to this change.”

“What kind of change?” Bonner hated change.

“You see, Sheldon, we had a problem. A structural problem. I know, you see, that you feel you have not been paid well. I was trying to find money for you, I mean the kind of money that you deserve, in a place where there was no money to be had. What I mean is, there is no money there any more. I am not immune to money myself.” He smiled, as if this humanizing trait were a source of wonder. “I wasn’t being paid enough, either, my friend. There seemed to be an assumption that I would work for love. Of what, I ask you? History? A corrupt system? It seemed to me contradictory that they impose the ‘free-market economy’ and then ask me to do without. So—”He turned more toward Bonner, his right hand still deep in his pocket. “I’ve changed employers, Sheldon. I want you to come with me.” He smiled. “I’m afraid I must have a yes or no today.”

“Changed to who?”

“Who has money?”

Bonner looked into his eyes. “The ragheads,” he said. “Or the Japs, but you wouldn’t go there. The ragheads?”

“They’re very excited about you coming with me. ‘What can you bring?’ they asked me. I told them, some of my stars, like you. You most of all—my star of stars. My best!”

Bonner grinned, but his gut was churning. A change would mean relearning everything, he was sure. New people, new codes, all that shit he hardly understood as it was. “I dunno,” he said.

“I hope you say yes,” Carl murmured.

“Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t you, Carl. You’re the best, you’ve never let me down. But jeez, this last two years—” Bonner made a face. Carl was the very one he had wanted to complain to, and now here he was and Bonner was tongue-tied. He tried to stare at the castle so he wouldn’t see Carl’s eyes, and he said quickly, “I think somebody’s been skimming my money. There just hasn’t been enough!” Bonner jerked his shoulders, then his head. He made a futile gesture with his left hand, the hand closest to Carl. He laughed nervously, then tried to rush at the prepared anger. “They’re nickel-and-diming me, I can’t live on what I’m getting! It’s insulting, is what it is. I’m taking the risk and they’re paying me like minimum wage, like I’m bringing them goddam burgers or something instead of what I am.” He had begun to stammer and he stopped, leaned back into the hard wood of the bench. He rubbed his forehead. “My taxes on my house are more than they paid me last year all put together. I told the guy in Norfolk, the pudgy guy, I need some things. They may not mean much to you; to me, they’re important. I need a new boat. He as good as said I’d get one. Then, nothing!” He had actually worked himself up this time, and he let the anger burst out. “They’re cheating me!”

“I’m glad we’re having this talk, Sheldon.”

“I think they’re skimming my money, taking a lot for themselves. Can we go over the figures for last year? You may not know what—”

Carl held up a hand. “Precisely why I’m here, Shel. The very changes that I’m talking about! I can’t tell you how glad I am to have this frank talk with you. It’s exactly what I wanted.”

They both looked up and down the road. Bonner then looked over his shoulder at the wall across the pavement. It was a well-chosen spot. They could see anybody coming a long way away; the car was nearby, and he supposed there were other watchers; and if they had to, they could go over the railing and down the hill in front of them. It was steep but not impossible and would lead to a maze of streets.

“This is a good place,” Bonner said.

“I told my new employers what you did fourteen months ago. They were very excited. ‘We must have him, we must have this man.’ They’ll pay.”

“Ragheads?”

“Iran.”

“Oil money.” Bonner made a face. “The money’d have to be good. My expenses are enormous, Carl. I can’t be nickel-and-dimed!”

“Precisely my point.”

“How much?”

“They’ll raise the regular amount to a thousand a month. But they are a different people from you and me. You must not be put off, Shel, if now and then their requests seem a little … quirky. The thing is, you know, they want to know everything and they don’t know anything at all! For example, they asked me to get from you the liberty ports of your ship.”

“For Christ’s sake, it was in the fucking newspaper!”

Carl laughed. “But they don’t know that! Humor them.”

“They don’t sound very professional.”

“We will train them. And they will pay. Good money. They like to pay per delivery, bigger sums but for achievement. They are motivators.” He leaned forward. “Yes or no, Sheldon?”

“I need big bucks, Carl. I’m in debt.”

“I can get you twenty-five thousand for something good. They want to pay you that kind of money, believe me; they’re dripping with oil, they like paying for quality. Persians are like that.”

“I haven’t got anything right now. We agreed, I’d lay low for a year! Christ, I risked my balls getting the IFF for you. And then your people nickel-and-dimed me. Why didn’t you jump when you had the IFF?” IFF: identify friend or foe. It had taken him weeks to steal, and it had represented a new level of treason, a line being crossed.

“We think alike. No wonder I like you, Sheldon. As it happens, I brought the IFF out with me. I never turned it over in Moscow. It’s what I’m taking to Tehran. My bona fides.”

“Did you tell them I was the one delivered it?”

Carl nodded.

“They oughta pay me a bonus.”

“They don’t think that way.” He smiled. “But I do. There’ll be a little gift for you in your account this month. Out of my personal money.”

“You don’t have to do that—!”

“I insist. But I must have your answer. Yes or no?”

Bonner looked at the castle, not seeing it, thinking only of himself and his grievances and his money. Money. Well, if Carl could get him more money—”Sure, why not?”

Carl smiled. “I am so glad.”

“Let’s talk about the money.”

“Good! Money.” Carl relaxed. Bonner was flattered that his agreement seemed to mean so much to this important man. Carl’s hand came a little out of his pocket. “I want to give you more money, my friend. Because you have done such good work. Now, I’ve told my—our—new employers that you must have more money or they’ll lose you. But they would like something from you soon—a sign, a gesture. A commitment. Later, there will be something else. We will come to that. But for now, the short term, they think you can help them. What have you got? Unique to Iran, I mean.”

This was new to Bonner. He didn’t normally work in this way, being asked for specific things, right now; rather, he specialized in technology—not news but plans, models, parts, all things that took time. This new approach made him uneasy. “There’s scuttlebutt we’re on a joint ops with another carrier, it’s up in Palma right now. We’re going through the Canal first, to Mombasa then Bahrain. They follow in a month, then the word is we’ll hit somebody. Some guys say Iran, revenge for that bomb in the German club.”

“Yes? That’s good. That’s what they like. Can you confirm that?”

He shook his head. “I know the A-6 squadron’s doing low-levels because I heard the pilots talk. Plus they’re doing refueling with S-3s from the other carrier. So, you know, we could be way down the Gulf and still hit Iran.”

“Or Iraq.”

“Yeah, but there’s no reason. Iran, everybody says we owe them one. For the German club.” He wriggled on the bench. “Frankly, Carl, I think we owe the fucking ragheads one for that. That could’ve been me, sitting in that club when they bombed it.”

“So, one A-6 squadron and refueling from the other carrier. And?”

“Cover, that’s all. It’s small.”

“A surgical strike, then. You don’t know where. But you will know—won’t you, Sheldon?”

“I—I—That’s not my—modus operandi. I don’t like that shit. I’m a specialist.”

“But, for once, I think we must work this way. The Iranians want a gesture. Between you and me, they would like to test the IFF before they surprise your Navy with it—specifically, they want to test using the IFF to target missiles. We have given them the system; they have the technology; what they will need is the frequency.”

“We change it all the time.”

“I know.” Carl joined his hands. “But if you put a prearranged frequency into the aircraft, and the Iranians targeted their missiles for that frequency, then they should be able to shoot down the aircraft. Shouldn’t they?”

His face became stubborn. “It wouldn’t work.”

“I insist it would.”

Sheldon turned his head toward Carl, daring him to contradict, angry again. “The first thing they’re airborne, they make a test pass and flash IFF. If you put in a different frequency they go negative and they abort. Great idea! A whole squadron makes one pass around the carrier and lands. Brilliant.”

Carl’s face darkened and his hand slipped back into his pocket. “Think of something, then, Sheldon. Your future depends on it.”

“What the hell!”

Carl shrugged. “They want results.”

“They’re Nazis. Fucking lot of Nazis!”

Carl merely looked at him. “Think of something.”

Bonner looked up and down the road. It would be almost a relief to have some NCIS goon walk in on them. No, it wouldn’t. It would be the end of everything. Carl, he knew, was his only chance to make it big.

“One aircraft,” he said. “One aircraft, you might get away with it. Some of these hotshots, they’ll lie when they test the IFF, because they don’t want to scrub. Especially a real mission. Some of these guys piss themselves they’re so hot to go. Like—” He was thinking fast. “The skipper of the A-6 squadron. A fucking kamikaze. He wouldn’t abort if the wings fell off his fucking aircraft.” He shifted, began to get interested. “And if it was only one, see, they wouldn’t trace it back to whoever put the codes in. A whole squadron, Christ, they’d know in three seconds it had to be something like the IFF, even if you could get around the test run. They’d put every sonofabitch who has access to the aircraft on a polygraph. Or they wouldn’t even have to. They got us all on lists, computers. Big Brother is watching.”

“Can you do it?”

“Me! Get some other sucker.” Bonner folded his arms. “That’s not my specialty. I’ve never done stuff.”

“Can’t you do it?” Carl’s voice was soft and pleading, almost feminine. “Sheldon, I need you to do it. Only this once.”

Bonner started to whine again. “I’d have to find out which plane he’s gonna fly, and that can be tricky; then I gotta get at the plane, but I gotta nick the gun that inserts the codes and reset it. It’s too much!”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“I’m not a saboteur! I’m a—a—” He shrank into himself. “Specialist.”

“I need you to do this for me, Sheldon. For both of us. The Iranians will be charmed to shoot down the CO of an attack squadron. They will love us! We will have years and years with them, Shel.”

“I need more money.”

Carl frowned. “I might get you thirty-five. I can try. I promise I will try.”

“That’s it? Tops?”

Carl nodded.

Actually, thirty-five was more than he’d dared think about. He owed about fifteen. Still, it would be a horrible effort. His gut would be a mess until it was over. He continued to object. “You’d have to get the frequency to me. So I’d know what to set in the plane. I’d try to give you the target. The timing’s all wrong.”

“I’ll have a frequency for you when you put into Mombasa. Then you should know the rest by the time you reach Bahrain.”

“What if we make the hit before we get to Bahrain?”

“We’ll take that chance. These people understand that such a thing is not easy. They have a good idea what the potential targets are, anyway.”

“I oughta get my money either way.”

“That is understood. I think there will be a bonus for a confirmed kill. Yes, I think it is a very good idea, this one. They will be able to test their system and the Navy will have no idea it has happened. Then, the next time—” He fluttered his fingers in the air like disintegrating aircraft.

Bonner felt sweat trickling down his ribs. “I’ll be shitting bricks until it’s over,” he said.

“Yes, but when it’s over, think how good you’ll feel. Money, Sheldon!”

They spent some time talking over the details, and the longer they talked, the more familiar it seemed to Bonner, therefore the more workable. This was a trick he would have to play on himself, making it familiar, so that after a few days he would not come to with a start and remember that he was going to do this thing, feeling his colon lurch. Actually, even now, once he got a little used to it and the chill of fear had passed, he liked the planning, and he liked sitting here with this important man, who had been a big gun in Moscow and now was going to be a big gun in Tehran. He liked being wanted. And he liked the money.

“How is your son?” Carl said when they were done.

“Good. He writes, like, once a month.”

“He is still in the satellite communications school?”

“Yeah. Four months, he comes out, he’s an E5, one bump down from his old man.”

“Tehran are very interested in him. They are mad for communications technology. You will speak to him?”

“The time isn’t right. When it’s right, I will.”

“Maybe, the slow approach, Sheldon—little by little—”

“Don’t tell me how to handle my own son! I’ll do it. In my time! He’ll come around. I gotta put it to him just right—father and son, doing it together. He’s very idealistic. He doesn’t know I do this, I’ve told you that. I’ll bring him around, but—Just don’t tell me how to handle my own son.”

“Well—Of course. It is a wise father who knows his child—eh?”

They walked up the hill to the car. Carl told him a taxi was waiting for him around the next curve.

They did not touch. Carl put on sunglasses, as if he were withdrawing his personality. “You must bring your son in, Sheldon. It will be worth—lots of money. Eh?”

The car pulled away, and Bonner was left feeling suddenly isolated on that sunny stretch of road, with the city close by but somehow unreal, as if it was unpopulated, as if he was the only man on earth. He had no idea how close he had come to dying.

He walked up the hill, sweating again, and found the taxi. On the back seat was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Bonner went back to his hotel and turned on the television and began to drink. It was only early afternoon, but he was content to sit there, watching the bright colors, hearing the language he did not understand, a man more comfortable with his loneliness than with any other companion the teeming city could offer.

He began to plan how he would turn his son into a spy.

1615 Zulu. Moscow.

Ouspenskaya slipped into the Director’s office after a single knock. The receptionist was gone, the building quiet except for the duty crews on the second floor, and here and there some manager like the Director plugging away. He knew she was coming.

“Well? What is urgent?” His cold was worse.

“Efremov.”

“Yes?”

She sat down. Her hands were trembling. She was truly wretched, for something monstrous had obtruded into this place, this idea she had of Moscow and being Russian, as if an obscene animal had dragged its slime across her foot. “Five days ago, a gang attacked an office in the Stitkin Building here in Moscow. Twenty-nine dead.”

“I remember.” He guessed at once; his voice showed it.

“The office was Efremov’s latest front operation. Venux, Inc. To run the four agents I told you of.”

“Oh, my God.” He was breathing through his mouth like an adenoidal child, looking absurd and feeling dreadful. “My God,” he said again as he saw it all. “They wiped out the entire operation.”

She nodded. “A hired job. Ex-military all over it.”

“Maybe it’s a fake—”

She shook her head. “What do you think, the Army did it? No, no! It’s just what we’re doing to ourselves! Efremov disappears; somebody wipes out his best operation—every clerk, every computer operator; they burned the place out—files, disks, shredder, everything! We’re already four days late; the police treated it as ordinary crime—‘ordinary,’ ah!—and our people didn’t go in until I sent them an hour ago. There’s already been looting of what’s left. What kind of people are we becoming?”

“You think—the father of the girlfriend? Mafia?”

“I don’t know. For what? Revenge?” She shrugged. “I’m having Papa Malenkov brought in. No pussy-footing. I’ve told them to rough him up and see what he says. Let him know we’re not the Moscow police.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t add up. If it’s a message to us, why hit a disguised operation that we don’t know about? If it’s a message to Efremov, where is he? Is he dead? Then what’s the point?” She wiped her cheeks, sank back. What she was suffering was grief, grief for a lost ideal. “Maybe he’s dead. But maybe he isn’t. And if he isn’t—”

“If he isn’t—Maybe he did it. Eh? You say this operation was new—a few months. Nine? Nine. So—maybe, that long ago, he was planning—something?”

“It seems far-fetched. But Efremov could be very cute if he wanted to. He liked to cover his tracks, even long before—mmm—current conditions.”

The Director made a face. “Say it. Long before perestroika. My God! The good old days.” He made a sound, something between a laugh and a groan. “My God, Ouspenskaya, what a ball of shit it’s all turned into! Any idea where Efremov would go?”

“None.”

“Out of the country?”

“I suppose.”

“You’ve checked the various agencies that—of course you have. All right, he was clever, he was an old campaigner, he could have gone over any border he wanted. I’m only brainstorming, mind you—improvising; I’m sure he’s dead, in fact. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, he isn’t. Presumably he had money abroad. Well. So, he destroys the organization that handles his best agents. To deny us? Of course, a nice joke, one ‘in your eye,’ as they say. He never liked me, I might say. You, I always thought he had his eye on. No? Well, there you are. I’m a bureaucrat, not a human relations specialist. Presumably he plans to take himself to somebody else, with his star agents as his salesman’s samples—eh? So he destroys everything and everybody who can track those agents. Well, that makes a grisly kind of sense. So who does he go to? The Americans? Not likely; he really despised the Americans. Notice I talk of him in the past tense, as if he were dead.” He made the laughing groan again, trying to break through her mood. Failing, he said, “Please, Ouspenskaya!” He came around the desk, stood in front of her, patted her shoulder. He only made things worse: she began to weep. The Director poured a glass of water from his carafe (made in Sweden) and held it out to her.

“There’s something else,” she said.

“Oh, shit.” He retreated behind his desk.

“I’m sure there’s a discrepancy between his claims for eighty agents and the agents themselves. I haven’t got proof yet, but there’s too much organization, too much system manipulation, and not enough information. I think some of the eighty are dummies.”

He leaned his forehead on one hand. “Not all of them. Efremov got wonderful information from real agents!”

“I have an idea, Director.”

“Good, because I certainly don’t.”

“There is probably more in the computers than we can tease out. We need specialists. The computer was installed ages ago by East Germans who would not even be seen speaking to us now. Let’s go to the Americans.”

He paused, a tissue halfway to his nose.

“The Americans know everything about computers,” she went on. She was more cheerful, talking about what could be done. “We tell them that Efremov has bolted and that one of his agents is American. That will make them hot, you know. Then we tell them there is more in the computer but we can’t winkle it out. We will let their specialists into the computer if they will replace the system with IBM machines when they are done. And give us whatever they find of Efremov’s. We lose nothing. And they will take care of Efremov for us.”

He stared at her.

“I am sick of using low-end technology!” she shouted. “And I want a new telephone, too!”

He swiveled to look out the window. The rain was still streaming down. He balled a damp tissue between his palms, rolling it back and forth, back and forth, at last dropped it into the plastic bag, then got up and left the office. She heard the water run in his private bathroom. The toilet flushed. He came out wiping his hands on a handkerchief.

“Not yet,” he said.

She hitched forward in her chair. “I was approached by an American at the Venice Conference. A very obvious move—in fact, she said so. ‘Now that the Cold War is over,’ and so on. I know I could make the contact!”

“Of course you could make a contact; I could make a contact; who couldn’t? You’re not thinking clearly, Ouspenskaya. No, letting the Americans into Efremov’s computer files would be obscene. Just now. Not that I wouldn’t do it if I was absolutely sure he was alive and working for somebody else.”

“He has been responsible for killing twenty-nine of his own people. And he is a traitor!”

“You don’t know that! Did you report this approach at the Venice Conference?”

“Of course.”

“Who was it?”

“A woman. It’s all in my report.”

He hesitated for that millisecond that betrays suspicion, then glanced at her almost apologetically. He was thinking Those American women—you hear strange things—they do things with other women—He moved uncomfortably; he felt out of place in this new and more dangerous world. He cleared his throat. “What did she offer you?”

“It wasn’t an offer. An idea—a Soviet-American thinktank. American money. I would participate at a high level.”

“A little obvious, maybe?”

“She said as much—pointed out that three SVRR generals were touring US military bases as we spoke.”

He made a little throat-clearing sound, a sign of hesitation—this hint of possibly irregular sex embarrassed him—and said gently, “Who is she?”

“She works for George Shreed. She made that quite clear enough.” She laughed, throatily. “Quite clear. What is it Americans call it—’name-pushing’?”

“Name-dropping, I believe. George Shreed. Well, well.” Shreed was more or less his opposite number in the CIA, at least so placed that the Director looked upon him as almost a rival in the same bureaucracy. Competitiveness tingled, despite his cold. “People like Shreed never dared reach into my directorate before. It’s a new world.”

“One in which a Colonel murders twenty-nine of his own people and betrays his country. For money! I know it! I feel it! The bastard!”

The Director groaned. He was sure that Ouspenskaya would resist any seduction from an immoral American woman. Wouldn’t she? He had managed to clear one nostril. He breathed through it for some seconds. “Did I tell you Gronski left with twenty-four hours’ notice ‘to enter the private sector’? What private sector? Money—the new socialist ideal. Well. All right, renew the contact with Shreed’s woman. Prepare the ground, but do nothing. File a report on everything you do. Put everything in writing for me. Get together with somebody who knows the computer and draft a plan for clearing it, then have them squeeze every drop of data out of it. I want every individual who has worked for Efremov in the last five years interviewed on polygraph—right down to the clerks. You run this, Ouspenskaya. If there are dummy agents he was taking money for, I want details. The individuals won’t know about it; they’ll think everything was straight. If they had suspicions, maybe he paid one or two off. But he was so good I’ll bet nobody got suspicious. But somewhere in the records there will be glitches. You can’t run ghosts and not have it show up.”

She stood. “You go to bed.”

He groaned. As she turned to go, he said, “Get what you can on the four agents who were being run out of the place that was attacked. You’ll have to go back to before he compartmentalized them. Maybe even back before we computerized. A big job.”

“I want to nail him like a new Christ.”

“Yes, but don’t want it so much that you overlook things that will exonerate him. Remember—maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s under a new pouring of concrete somewhere. Maybe he’s innocent.”

“He isn’t!”

He ignored that. “I want everything on those four agents. Especially the American. I think we can do something with that.”

She didn’t ask him what.

2010 Zulu. Naples.

Kim fed Alan a strawberry from her plate and pressed her leg against his. She had forgiven him, because he had wangled an extra day’s liberty and because he had taken her to this elegant, expensive restaurant where Italian men looked at her as if she were the dessert cart. Then, Alan had pointed out three officers from the carrier, then Narc and two guys and a couple of women who wouldn’t have dared look into the same mirror with Kim. Narc’s eyes had bugged out, not only because Kim was such a woman, but because it was the Spy who had her. She giggled and pressed his leg and said she loved him so much.

“I hate the Navy,” she said happily. Her tongue flicked at a dot of whipped cream at the corner of her mouth. “I’m going to make my father give you a job so you can get out of the Navy and we can stay in bed all the time.”

He was not immune to being flattered. “You really believe your father’s going to pay me to stay in bed with his daughter?”

“What Kimberley wants,” she said, with a tiny smile, “Kimberley gets.”

Her father was a big shot in Florida. The Hoyts had a huge house on the beach near Jacksonville; Alan had got lost in it, trying to find the head. Her brother had laughed at him for that. Alan hadn’t liked him, a muscled twenty-year-old who spent his spare time on a jet ski and talked a lot about reverse discrimination. He had called Alan “admiral.” Something in his posture, his aggressiveness, had challenged Alan, as if they were rivals. The father had looked on at this with a small smile.

“I don’t think I could work for your father,” Alan said now.

“Oh, if the price is right, I bet you could.” She kissed him. “And the price will be right.”

She smiled. She licked her lips. He thought she was about the most desirable thing he’d ever seen. He began to tell her the story of landing into the net.

5

Their first liberty ports behind them, the Roosevelt and the Jefferson moved down the Med in seemingly separate paths. The two great ships transited the Suez three weeks apart, then lingered briefly within a hundred miles of each other at the mouth of the Red Sea. Roosevelt docked at Mombasa; Jefferson forged eastward toward the Gulf, where Iran and Iraq, exhausted from their war, still lay spitting and snarling at each other like wounded cats. For Alan Craik, the carrier became his life. A meeting with Kim in Bahrain was dreamlike, quickly relegated to a vague background of fantasies and remembrance, against which his real world played. Real life was intelligence and flight, the CVIC and Christine. Now, he was like a hungry man let loose at a banquet table: he devoured and devoured and wanted more.

Over those three months, the two carriers approached each other and moved away, partners in a vast dance discernible only to their captains—never close enough to make a common nuclear target, never far enough apart to foreclose joint operations. Four months after they had passed Gibraltar, they reached designated points within range of the Iranian coast and began to brief their aircrews on the mission labeled KNIGHTHOOD.

On the scale of air warfare, the carrier is a siege engine; its target is a vast fortress of electronics and missiles. Night is the preferred environment, when men’s eyes fail and the side with the best electronic vision wins.

On the night sea, the deck of the carrier is a vision from some ancient legend, lit by flashes like lightning, tense with the nervous movements of men, raucous with sounds like the forges of Vulcan. The senses are battered by the power of the thing, the urgency and vigor of its component parts. Planes land in a roar and flash of sparks or leap into the air from hidden catapults. All around, men labor in shifting, flickering light, while the deck vibrates with the power of the screws and the planes and the machinery, and you feel the vibration in your very bones. The smell of JP-5, the lifeblood of naval aviation, is everywhere.

Beneath this sensual assault is intellectual wonder that the engine works. Men scurry through the noise, the patches of light and blackness, the danger; mysterious instructions whisper down dozens of radio channels; planes are fueled, repaired, launched, recovered, given ordnance, checked for weight, preflighted, tied down, chocked, released, rolled, towed; alerts are set and manned; while high overhead those aloft conduct their missions, talk to the tower, talk to each other, refuel in the air, prepare to land, parts of the great engine even while distant from it. Below the flight deck, intelligence plans missions, reviews debriefings, plays off future against past; powerful computers trade immense quantities of information about the carrier, her friends, her enemies, and all the complex world that now falls between. Elsewhere within, her crew is fed, their clothes are washed, their spaces are kept clean and neat, their beds are made, their confessions are heard and their prayers are spoken, their frailties are punished and their successes are rewarded, all while the ship drives through the water, powered by her nuclear heart. Almost six thousand humans crew her and her brood of aircraft, and very few of them are sleeping now.

All of this marvel is directed toward a single goal: the extension of naval supremacy through the air to any target. Opposed to it this night is the modern technological fortress, the integrated air defense system—the IADS, sterile name for a citadel that might once have been called Ticonderoga or the Krak des Chevaliers. Lay out this IADS on the map and you will see a many-layered fortress: the early-warning radars as the outer wall, spaced in rough terrain, bunched in smooth, surrounding clumps of smaller forts—missile sites—that defend potential targets; yet more sites defend the sector headquarters; at the center of all sits the air defense command, controlling all, ready to call up fighter aircraft the way Saladin once called up his cavalry.

The early-warning radars are the eyes of the system. They are everywhere—perimeter, SAM sites, defense areas, every attack corridor. The SAMs—surface-to-air missiles—are the archers; at each SAM center is a powerful, long-range missile site that must in its turn be protected by smaller SAMs and conventional anti-aircraft (AAA). The AAA remains deadly against low-flying attackers; it is not tricked by chaff and flares—the electronic dust thrown into radar’s eye. Each SAM site also has fire-control radars, a field of microwave dishes, land lines, cables, and communications devices: it is no small thing.

Communication is essential, because the radar horizon on our small planet is a measly twenty-two miles. Even from a mountain or a giant tower, a radar sees only thirty or forty miles—in the age of supersonic aircraft and big-stick (long-range) missiles, like being legally blind. Therefore, it is only at a headquarters controlling hundreds of EW radars that an incoming attack can be understood and that understanding passed to the SAM sites, usually by regions or sectors. At the center of all the sectors is the Air Defense Headquarters, resolving conflicts between sectors and controlling the fighter force.

This, then, is the siege warfare of the late twentieth century, when the besieger moves at hundreds of miles an hour, attempting to destroy EW radars and SAM sites to open safe routes to targets while fighting off the missiles and AAA and aircraft that the fortress deploys. It is fast and complex and seemingly clean, but, as in the days when warriors smashed steel visors with hammers, men die.

On both sides.

12 July 1990. 0315 Zulu. Ottawa, Canada.

Most of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police building was quiet, but on the third floor a block of offices was alive with the sounds of day—voices, telephones, computer keys, music that boomed until a hoarse voice shouted to turn it down. A gray-haired man carried a computer printout along an uncarpeted corridor, turned a corner, started past a row of doors and pulled up just after passing an open one. Thinking better of something, he leaned in.

“You interested in four Russians?”

“You got four for sale, eh?”

“Ha-ha, I’m laughing right out loud. I got a report from Vancouver about four Russians they’re just processing through—tourist visas, very little luggage, at least one checks out as former Spetsnaz.”

“Where they coming from?”

The man checked a sheet. “Vladivostok. Direct flight.”

“They holding them?”

“‘Detained in the normal course of immigration procedure.’”

“Lemme see.” The man at the desk took the printout. “Four hard cases,” he said. “You read this, eh? All four Spetsnaz, would be my guess. Ages are right, descriptions. So what we may have is four nouveau-mafia types who think muscling in on Canadian rackets might be a nice way to go. The kind that give me the pip—right shits, thinking we’re easy pieces.” He held out the sheets. “Nice catch, Tony. Tell Vancouver to let them through but put a tail on them. Descriptions and photos throughout, middle priority, ‘surveillance for information only.’ Open a file, put it in your manor—stay on top of it, eh? Update every seventy-two hours. This one smells.”

“Maybe it’s four former Spetsnaz who like hockey.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice. And Tony, put together a grab team. Just in case we want to talk to them.”

Tony looked a little piqued. “Some of us have lives, sir. And Senators tickets.”

“Do it anyway. It’s not like the Senators will win, eh? All our best guys are playing in the States.”

23 July 1990. 2113 Zulu. The Persian Gulf.

Alan Craik lived in two worlds now. Squadron intelligence officers worked in the Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC), planning routine missions, massaging raw intelligence. But aircrewmen flew with their squadron. And he was both. He had to balance the two, pretend that each of these prickly groups had his first priority.

But this night was different. He had finished his work as intelligence officer—forty hours of preparation and briefing—and he could take up his work as aircrewman without apology. If he was allowed.

He had been working to prepare the operation called KNIGHTHOOD. It was the reason for the doubling of the carrier presence in the Gulf, the reason for his father’s boat’s shadowing his own. Its generalities had been planned in Washington; its specifics were completed by men like Alan on the carriers; its execution would be done by men like his father.

An Iranian radar post was to be destroyed. KNIGHTHOOD would open a hole in the Iranian IADS by exploiting low-level coastal radar gaps, which would be used by two strike groups. Iranian casualties were meant to be light—casualties were bad press, even with a secret operation—but their military would learn how porous their fortress was. Perhaps a higher level would then understand how expensive terrorism could become.

Alan’s work in CVIC gave him solid knowledge of what his own squadron would do, and he had begged his skipper and the ops officer to let him go. Christine was to be a mission tanker, fairly safe (he assured them) off the coast. He was a pretty good TACCO now, he had dared to say—ask Rafe, ask Senior Chief Craw. But they had put him off—because, he believed, he was Mick Craik’s son and they didn’t know how his father would take it.

He wanted to go more than he had ever wanted anything—more than he had wanted Kim, more than he had wanted that high school letter. He wanted the reality of it, and he knew that this want was different from the other wants, which seemed of another kind, even of another world. He wanted it, he thought, to be a man.

And, apparently, he wasn’t to have it.

He knew every plane going out that night, every piece of the complex series of raids designed to peel the onion of the Iranian IADS and leave them to face the morning with a huge breech in their defenses. And he wasn’t to be among them.

He sat with a cup of coffee before him, hurt as he thought he had never been hurt before. Around him, the level of voices was higher, somehow tighter, the ones who were going sounding too loud and too happy. A few who couldn’t wait were already fiddling with their gear.

Maybe, he thought, it’s better in the long run not to get what you want. Maybe disappointment makes you a man. Maybe the moon is made of green cheese.

“Been looking all over for you.” The voice was right above his head. A hand fell on his shoulder. His skipper’s.

Alan looked up. His heart lurched. The hand squeezed. The skipper was looking away from him, off to a group of pilots; he shouted, “Gilder, I gotta talk to you, pronto!” He turned back, looked down. Their eyes locked. “You’re going. Get into your flight gear.” The hand lifted and fell—a pat on the shoulder. And then the skipper was gone.

He was going.

Alan was only human. He longed to go back to CVIC and drop just a hint, to see the envy of the other IOs, that he was going on a real mission. Cheap thrill, he thought—but he almost did it anyway, saved from doing something tacky and small-minded and altogether satisfying because there just wasn’t time. Instead, he bolted for his stateroom and started to twist himself into his flight suit.

His roommate looked up from a magazine, said with total conviction, “Lucky fuckin’ prick!”

He already knew.

Surfer was a seasoned flyer, had taken him as a roommate instead of another pilot so as to teach him some substratum of ethics or manners that wasn’t in the books.

“I wish it was you.”

“Like hell.” Surfer rolled the magazine in his hands. “Skipper asked me, I told him he goddam better let you go.” He gestured with the magazine. “You deserve it.”

“We’ll probably go down on deck.”

“You’ll probably be the first Spy in history with a fuckin’ Air Medal you mean.” Surfer nodded with sad conviction. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Alan finally got his left foot into his boot and grabbed his helmet bag from his rack. “Don’t wait up, dear.” Surfer gave him the finger as he closed the hatch.

Mick Craik went over the details of his mission for the hundredth time while two para-riggers moved around him, squires to a knight in green armour. One part of his brain—the part that was squadron skipper—noted that Tiernan, the problem child of the rigger shop, was suddenly conscientious about his duties, made a mental note that maybe what Tiernan needed was more responsibility, not less. Another part of his mind—the NavAv part—noted that his helmet had finally been retaped; his personal coat of arms, a fluorescent orange net catching a burning plane, glowed from the LPO’s desk in the corner. The seasoned pilot in him noted that his young bombardier-navigator was having a more difficult time than usual getting his gear on. Kid was nervous.

Hell, he was nervous himself, and he was one of three people on this strike who had actually done it before. The difference was, he thought, that the boy was probably worried about intangibles: bravery, cowardice, the unknown. Craik was nervous because he didn’t like the plan: not enough gas in the air, some of it too far forward; too much contempt for the Iranians, not enough worry about blue on blues over the target.

But that wasn’t really it. What he really didn’t like was that the targets had been set in Washington. He was leader for the whole strike, but he was an arrowhead on an arrow launched by politicians. He liked a different plan, his own plan, with a different target picked out here by the people on the spot: bomb the Iranian Navy base at Bandar Abbas. No chance of error, and a very direct message.

He patted the BN on the shoulder, gave him a reassuring smile. “Piece of cake,” he said.

Miles away, his son ran down the main portside passageway toward the aviators’ wardroom, the eatery known locally as the Dirty Shirt. His nose told him that chocolate-chip cookies had just been baked, and he meant to get some for his crew and fill his thermos with coffee. Rafe called him “the stewardess,” but there was no barb to it; in fact, Alan believed that it was one of the things that the Spy did that made his crew think he might be a regular guy after all. He scooped twenty or so out of the cookie bucket with a practiced hand, ignored the mutters and shouts of the onlookers, and dumped them into his helmet bag. He filled his thermos (L.L. Bean, stainless, one of the few gifts from his mother that was right on target, considered so valuable by the crew that it had never been part of a practical joke) and bolted back down the passageway. He left behind a circle of indignant Tomcat RIOs, equally upset that he was flying while they sat on their asses and that he had taken two dozen cookies.

Can’t take a joke, fuck ’em, as Rafe liked to say.

2120 Zulu. The Iranian Coast.

It was dark along the Iranian coast. The noncom they called Franci was not a very willing soldier, but he was an able one. In fact, he made the decisions at his SAM battery, although the orders were given by an officer who had less real knowledge but a more reliable history.

Now, Franci was chewing his moustache and smoking. They had been ordered up to full alert every night for two weeks—missiles on the rails, radar warm and ready. The imams apparently believed the American demons were coming. Franci supposed they were—he had lived in America, knew the almost casual belief in exercising power. The reverence for the gunslinger, he thought.

So he sat in the command trailer and waited.

The box had arrived five nights before. It had been bolted on the main radar dish. The zealot who had brought it had said that it would see the infidels as they crossed into Iranian air space. This was a story for children, in Franci’s view; six years at the University of Buffalo, from which he had been forced home by threats to his family, convinced him that the box must somehow turn the dish into a (probably inefficient) passive detector. The zealot had sworn that when the blue-green light went on in the command van, the Americans would be coming.

And so they would be, Franci mused.

He had also seen the Revolutionary Guards bring in a missile launcher of their own, now standing well clear of the SAM battery. As usual, it looked like industrial scrap held together with string. The RGs loved toys, he thought—no, “Correction,” as his American friends used to say, all Iranians loved toys—look at the outboard boats mounted with machine guns, the taxi-mounted rocket launchers. Gadgets for a preindustrial theocracy.

The missile, when he had been allowed to glance at it uncovered, had looked to him like an ancient I-Hawk with the front end tarted up. The electrical engineer in him had cringed. It had looked like trouble to him. Big Trouble. Things meant to go bang were always big trouble for somebody unless they were properly designed and engineered.

So he had approached his own officer about it, although coming at the matter circumspectly, after the fashion of a stray dog approaching a kindly voice—sideways and ready for a kick.

“Ha, Rasi, and how is your wife?” he had said.

“She is well, soldier of the servants of God. Soldier, I am not to be addressed by name by you with, ah, hmm, them here.” He had nodded toward the shrouded missile, as if it represented the Revolutionary Guards in all their power. And their narrow-mindedness.

“Rasi, may your name be blessed,” Franci had said, not able entirely to suppress irony, “friend of all soldiers, I abase myself,” and he had started to kneel, causing the officer to wince and urge him to his feet. Enough was enough, obviously.

However, they had got to the real subject. “These Revolutionary Guards,” Franci had said. He had nodded toward the missile. “The Hour is almost upon us, and their creation is, um, in the sun.”

“What? Hour? What hour?”

Franci had got excited. He could deal with idiots only so long. “The Hour! Are you incapable? The Hour when our camouflage is supposed to be up! When everything must be covered! When—!” He had swallowed, flapped his arms up and down and slapped his sides. Then, more calmly, “When Tehran tell us we must be invisible to the eyes the Americans have put in the heavens to circle the earth.”

“You go far beyond yourself to shout at me. This is not proper. I will note it. Somewhere.” The officer had pulled at his open collar as if he wished for a more formal, more dignified uniform. “The Guard take care of themselves. Maybe they have their own camouflage. We do not tell them what to do. They are the Guard!”

Franci suspected they were shepherds who couldn’t read a word of the Koran, but he didn’t dare say so. Instead, he had said with the measured slowness of a man talking to a child, “They will give us away. They will give away the missile we are not supposed to see. They will get us all killed.”

“It is the will of God.”

Franci had sighed. He had not quite dared to say that the will of spy satellites worked no matter what God—or at least the Revolutionary Guard—might say.

So now, tonight, he sat in the command trailer and smoked his fifteenth Marlboro and watched the blue-green light that was supposed to come on when the Americans arrived.

And what would happen when it did?

2210 Zulu. The Gulf.

Skipper Craik walked slowly around his plane, looking into every opening, running his hand lovingly down her wings to her body, then crouching to look at her landing struts and gear. He never thought of the process as sexual, never saw the plane as a woman, although he would concede he had seen men run their hands over horses this way.

He glanced up to make sure that her chaff and flare cartridges were full, and as he did so was vaguely aware that the sailor coding his plane with an IFF gun was a stranger. Probably a recode, he thought; they changed IFF at the last minute, sometimes. Still, his BN had already got a sweet and sweet on deck, so why change it now? The question was an annoyance, low priority, not even a worry; he’d ask the kid what happened when they were on the cat.

He ran his hand up inside her jet intakes, checking for FOD or debris. Once in a while, some sailor with a grudge put a coin up there. He’d heard of a can of concrete, in another squadron. The fact that he had never found anything didn’t stop him. It was part of his ritual. He checked his car the same way.

If he checked it himself, nothing could go wrong.

Alan was finally ready. The frontseaters had already walked to the plane, but Senior Chief Craw refused to be hurried, even seemed to be dawdling. The delay covered nicely for Alan’s perpetual confusion about what order to put his flight gear on.

Master Chief Young, the senior enlisted maintenance man, met them at the back door to the ready room. He was kitted up for the flight deck.

“Got a present for you, sir,” he said to Alan.

Alan looked around a little foolishly. Master Chief had a way of doing that to him. Going on the mission was all the present he wanted; what else could there be?

“On deck,” the Master Chief said. They followed him down the passageway to the sponson, then up behind the tower.

All around them, the carrier was preparing for battle. Bombs were going by on carts; fuel lines were being laid out to planes; aircrews were checking them while lastminute maintenance was done. The heavy stink of kerosene filled the air.

Right at the elevator-deck edge sat Christine, long since repainted to cover the jokes left by their sister squadron on the Roosevelt. The facelift made her seem young again, and, caught in the glare of the launch of an early-cycle F-14 on burner, she was the most beautiful plane Alan had ever seen—a tribute to his loyalty, to say the least. Bulbous, big, and awkward, she towered over them like a bad dream.

Alan belatedly switched on his blue light and bent to perform his one preflight responsibility, the chaff and flare pods; the Master Chief grabbed his shoulder, turning him up and toward the fuselage, instead. He pointed.

Alan had to look for some seconds, then found it just below the TACCO’s window. There, stenciled on the gray hull, it said: LTJG ALAN CRAIK.

His name on the plane.

It meant acceptance—more, approval. And permanence. And what’s more, Rafe must have okayed it. Or even suggested it? Alan stumbled into the aircraft, knowing he was blushing and glad for the darkness, unable to speak. He almost forgot to preflight his seat.

Mick Craik sat on the cat, his eyes wandering over the instruments as he took his baby to full power. The earth moved, but the gauges were good; she was a goer. He and the kid began the priest-and-acolyte formula of prelaunch checks. He reached for his inner calm, found it, and pulled it over him like an old, loved coat. He wished he could do the same for the kid. If his boy were going, he’d want—

Where is Alan? he wondered. Surely Harry wouldn’t let him go on a live one like this. So you’d want him to treat your kid specially, and let somebody else’s kid go? he asked himself. He was no good at self-doubt; he pushed the question away.

He thought the S-3 tankers were being put too close to the coast—big, fat, dumb grapes waiting for some Iranian MiG jock to bag them. He had made the objection to Staff; a lot of good it had done. At any rate, he didn’t want Alan up in one of the tankers tonight. One Craik in the air was plenty. Anyway, Alan had a different future: he had a kind of smarts that his father felt he lacked, the kind that could take you to admiral. Mick Craik, he thought, would retire where he was.

Craik looked around. Planes crouched on every cat, and more waited behind every jet-blast deflector. Fire and light filled the darkness, and, as happened every time he saw it, he was filled with the power of it and moved by what he thought of as the glory. Not much glory left in war, he thought, but we still hear the tune.

This was the center of his life, the heart of his belief. This is where we treat people fair, and a guy who works and plays the team can get ahead. This is where they respect competence instead of bullshit, because when the chips are down your bombs either hit the target or they don’t. Skipper Craik had known some pretty weird types in naval aviation, but they all got measured by the same stick; either they could fly, or they couldn’t. And this was his America, not abstractions like liberty, Western democracy, capitalism, but a place of no-bullshit that offered great cars, great women, great flyfishing, and the most beautiful mountains on earth. For that place, he would climb into his fiery chariot and ride like the wrath of God against people he had never seen.

The blast deflector came up behind him. A blur of green showed as the cat crew hooked on the bridle.

Mick Craik loved “The Ride of the Valkyrie.” It went with the noise and the thrill of this moment on the cat, the first seconds of launch. He wished they could play it as the cat blasted them forward.

He was The Old Man in squadron myth, skipper in fact, old by comparison with the kids, and he knew that this was his last cruise with a stick in his hand. Yet he was eager to go. He wanted to prove himself one more time.

This was what he lived for. No women’s tears, no bill collectors, no bureaucrats. Just the stick and the target.

The cat officer crouched and began to extend his arm.

Dear God, he prayed silently, as he always did, make it a good one if it’s the last.

He snapped his best salute and they began to move.

Alan was ready for the cat when it came. For once, the sickly dust/electrical/old sweat smell of naval aviation was not threatening him with instant airsickness. Airborne, Rafe got a good IFF check from the boat and they cheered; Christine’s IFF was, according to legend, entirely constructed from chewing gum and old slinkies. Rafe started her on the long, slow climb to their tanker station as Narc began cycling through volumes of kneeboard cards to figure out how he could talk to their fighter cover—the entire launch and deployment was being done EMCON. Senior Chief began inserting radar frequencies into a computer hit list. Alan, with the back end online and for once in his life way ahead of the mission, was wiping the inside of his oxygen mask with an alcohol swab stolen from sick bay. He figured they would be on oxygen if anything happened, and the taste of old pizza would not help his airsickness.

He thumbed the intercom switch and began his stewardess routine. He tried to keep elation out of his voice, suppressed the urge to burble his thanks to everybody as he said, “Folks, we’re going to level off at Angels 23 and cruise there until someone needs gas, at which time Rafe will fart down the pipe. In the meantime, espresso and chocolate-chip cookies are being served by your flight attendant in the main cabin, and will remain available until we touch down at Cedar Rapids International. And thank you for flying Naval Air.”

Rafe let out a whoop, and a flight-gloved hand reached down the tunnel. Alan pressed the thermos into the hand, balanced two cookies atop it.

He turned to his monitor. Their radar was off, but he could watch other, active radars with his system, picking up the Iranian EWs as they arrowed from the coast. He began to log each one for the future. Someday, he thought, all of this will be done by a computer. Christine, however, couldn’t handle the math of multiple radar cuts.

Alan found that he didn’t like what he saw. His divided self tossed the information back and forth, TACCO to 10 to TACCO, and what they agreed on was that there was an unusual amount of Iranian radar activity. It indicated what they both saw as a very high degree of preparedness. Alan hadn’t expected to surprise the Iranians; the Persian Gulf is too small for that. But he had watched the IADS from routine flights, and he knew what it looked like on an ordinary night—a lot of bored operators flicking on and off, some sites never coming online in a whole seven-hour hop. This looked more like a carnival; everybody was up. Everybody but the SAM sites; they were asleep, while the EW net seemed to have insomnia.

He looked at his watch. The strike was due to go feet-dry (over the coast) in two minutes.

Somewhere out there was his father, doing the glory thing. He knew his father well enough for that. He knew the slightly husky tone when he spoke that word, glory, the refusal to elaborate. Glory had magnetism for Alan now, too, although when he had been a teenager he had thought it was bullshit, something old men invented to get young ones to die for them. Now he lived with men who believed that glory was the goal of life: men of a certain kind—real men, they would have said—went where it drew them. He was not yet sure what kind of man he was, but he knew he felt that pull.

But you could think about glory and continue to massage data for only so long. Then something in the data fell together and you forgot about the glory. Now, a disquieting pattern showed: even in EMCON, one of the E-2C Hawk-eyes was running the datalink, and a series of neat diamonds, denoting friendly aircraft and ships, lay over the screen like coarse mesh. What was now clear was that the activity of the IADS matched the diamonds. It did not take the Intel half of his head to tell the TACCO that the Iranians had this raid pegged.

That’s what the Nav gets paid for, he thought. Better equipment and better training ought to do the job. No sweat. Right?

POI Sheldon Bonner sat in the head and felt his entire gut shiver, as if there were ice there instead of the fire that seemed to explode under him. It had been getting worse for days, diarrhea like something you picked up in some godawful liberty port where you couldn’t drink the water or eat the fruit. Sick bay had given him pills. Christ, what a joke.

“Jeez, Boner,” a voice said from the next stall. “What’d you do, swallow some of the ordnance? Christ, if I smelled like that I’d kill myself.”

“Fuck off. I’m sick.”

“I’d tell you to blow it out your ass, Boner, but that seems to be your specialty. Whoo-hoo! Jesus Christ, ask for a transfer, will you?”

His hands were still shaking. He had seen the pilot look at him and he had forced himself to go on setting the IFF code, when what he wanted to do was drop the gun and run. The guy had looked right at him. Fucking skipper of the squadron, helmet all fluorescent orange tape, one of the joy-boys, guts and glory, all that shit. Fuck him. Let him see what it was like when he got to Iran.

He felt his bowels let go again. It would be like this for another week.

It’s worth it, he told himself. He tried to see the boat he would buy. He had a mental picture he called up at night before he went to sleep, him and his boy on the new boat. Fishing on the St John’s. Beer in the cooler. Then he’d tell the boy about the scheme and the money and how they were going to be partners. Together. Just the two of them. It would be wonderful. It would.

His insides heaved and squirted and he groaned aloud.

2315 Zulu. The Iranian Coast.

Franci worked with the intensity of a man at last able to do what he understood—tracking contacts, passing data, answering the telephone—using technology. He was one of the very few who understood how the electronic fortress works, and he had created his own informal phone link with others like him. For the duration of the raid, he was alive.

Now, he knew that a rain of anti-radiation missiles had begun. To turn a radar on was to invite death; he did not. Yet, through the eyes of a radar on a hill thirty miles behind him, he was able to watch the Americans come on.

The trailer door opened; a surprisingly courteous voice said, “Who is in charge, please?” It was a Revolutionary Guard full colonel. Everybody but Franci’s officer pointed at Franci.

“I am in charge,” the officer said.

“Show me the situation.”

The officer turned smoothly to Franci. “Show the colonel the situation.”

Franci didn’t care who got the credit or what the pecking order was; he was caught up in the pleasure of doing the job. “They are coming in two strikes from the carriers, about forty miles apart. Northern strike will pass directly over us—unless we’re the target, Allah forbid. Seven minutes to arrival.”

The colonel handed him a cellular telephone. “Pass course and speed data to my shooter. No radar illumination until you are so ordered.”

Franci was enthusiastic about not illuminating the radar: why make themselves a target?

The colonel left the trailer; Franci’s officer teetered on his toes and watched the clock; Franci passed data and plotted vectors. Six minutes. Five minutes. Four. Three.

The Revolutionary Guard detachment fired their mysterious missile at six miles. Radar recorded one plane falling below the formation—an evident hit. Franci reported it on the cellphone.

“Illuminate your radar. Fire all missiles, whether targeted or not. This is a direct order from the colonel.” It was like an order to commit suicide.

His fire-control radar stayed on for less than ten seconds before a HARM missile, launched minutes before, identified it as a first-priority target and zeroed in.

Franci felt the earth heave, and God reached for him.

2322 Zulu. The Gulf.

A new signal had just lanced out from the mainland. Alan hooked it and read its stats. Weird—not anything he remembered. He leafed through his notes and didn’t find it. Then, too quickly, it disappeared and he was left to log it. Somewhere in the parameters of a Chinese early warning radar, he thought. It had been on only eight seconds. Maybe somebody had shot it with a HARM. Maybe its operator had panicked at what he saw and shut down.

It had gone on within seconds of the feet-dry time and within four miles of the northern target group’s route. It must have seen the whole northern strike package. Alan dialed up Strike Common, the radio frequency on which most chatter would occur when EMCON was dropped.

“Touchdown,” a voice in his helmet said. EMCON was over.

“Packers!” another voice cried, and the plane seemed to drop out from under him.

Packers were unfriendly aircraft that had leaked through the forward screen. To four men riding a big, fat grape, the word meant danger. Alan had a brief recall of an argument in CVIC about whether the tankers would be too close to the coast. We are, we are.

Rafe had the plane in a dive for the surface.

Alan punched up his datalink display. Christine gave a faint whine.

The display died.

“Shit, Senior! We lost the back end,” Alan groaned. Without conscious thought, he reached up, toggled the system switch off, counted ten, and toggled it on again.

Christine continued to dive.

As Alan tried to urge a glimmer from Christine’s brain, he checked and rechecked the chaff and flare counters above his head.

“Dumped the load,” he said into the mike. His anxiety showed in his voice. When you do a cold dump in an S-3 you lose a lot—not least the ability to see if the Packer is after you.

Rafe came on the line. He had long since got his confidence back after the double bolter, and four months of flying had made his decisions crisper. He was busy just then, but this was what he was trained for, no bullshit, just flying. “Masks on. Spy, get that fucking computer up and tell me what’s happening. Chaff and flare are armed.”

Alan reached up and fired a chaff/flare sequence. The numbers counted down; three chaff, two flares down, plenty to go. “Chaff/flare checks good, Senior’s got a reinit.” Alan’s fingers flew. He input the vital data—targets and known SAM sites—while Senior struggled to restore the datalink. Alan had to reinput his hotlist of radar contacts. When he hit the input button he saw that Senior had the datalink back up—and the news was bad.

Senior Chief Craw was drawling into the headset, “One bandit southeast nineteen NM and heading right at us. About 540 knots.”

“Spy! What is it? MiG-29?”

If it is we’re dead, he thought. Where the hell is our CAP? We had an F-14 out here ten minutes ago; his wingman had a hydraulics failure, but—

Alan found their missing CAP just as Narc did. “Fucking REO!” Narc shouted. Their protection had done his job and made a run at the intruder, but a nervous NFO and an inexperienced pilot had ended in a missed intercept and a bad shot. Narc had their Fighter Common on his comm and was trying to get the Tomcat back.

The intruder continued to bear down on them.

Why didn’t he turn and engage the Tomcat? He didn’t even seem to know that the fighter was there. Alan looked at his datalink and got a radar cut that ran like a sword through the unid box. The cut was rare; in effect, it was unknown, not present in the laundry list of radars and attached planes flown by threat countries. His head, however, unlike the datalink, was stuffed with such unconsidered trifles: he knew what it was.

“Chinese-built A-5 Fantan! Two Atoll AA missiles, shitty little radar. Rafe, get below eight hundred feet and he can’t get a tone with his birds.”

Rafe liked knowledge. He also liked certainty, and Alan sounded absolutely certain. And it was better than nice that it was a third-world pilot in a first-generation piece of shit chasing him, not some Russian mere in a MiG-29—an F-18 in drag—looking for a score.

“Okay, got it, we’re going through two thousand and I’d really like to know his stall speed and has he got a gun?”

Alan had his kneeboard packet open and the A-5 card was glaring at him, printed for some reason on fluorescent orange card stock. “Two 20-millimeters. 165 knots clean. Worse for this guy, he’s got to have a drop.”

He looked at the screen; Christ he’s close, Alan thought, and all hell broke loose.

“Chaff flare!” shouted Narc, and he fired the sequence himself from the front. Narc’s RAW gear showed a launch somewhere behind him. Alan leaned forward against the power of the dive and tried to read their altitude. “Below 1000!” he said, and Rafe pulled hard to the right, worse than the hardest break Alan had ever seen, and moonlit sea reached up hungrily toward the Senior’s porthole to pull Christine down. The altimeter was now at two hundred feet: Christine did not believe in registering lower altitudes. Alan forced his arm up against the G force and put the chaff on automatic. He suddenly didn’t trust all the data ingested at intel school. Had anybody ever actually fought an A-5? Fuck, what if all the intelligence was bullshit? Wasn’t that the point Peretz had tried to make to him?

Rafe rolled the plane 180 degrees and started a more comfortable turn. A flash went by Alan’s porthole. “Missiles timed out,” Alan said, mostly sure that he was right. Craw was shouting on Strike Common, but nobody was going to save them; they were too far from the strike package and too far from the ship. In five minutes, every Tomcat and Hornet in naval aviation would be crisscrossing this airspace in search of air medals, but five minutes is an age in aerial combat and this was now.

“He’s on top of us,” Alan said.

Christine bucked savagely. He felt a slap at his left elbow, and a star-edged hole appeared in the windscreen.

They knew Christine had been hit by the 20-millimeter. They felt the rounds go into her and waited for disaster; at two hundred feet, any glitch and they were dead.

Rafe tightened his turn and dumped more speed. Christine was such a peculiar bird, he muttered, that he swore she flew better with the damage. “Nice shooting, Tex,” Rafe murmured, and he eased off on the speed again and Christine was almost standing still in the air.

The last chaff pod emptied with a clunk. Another round hit Christine’s wing and she started to leak fuel and pull to the right. The airspeed indicator registered 165. Rafe tilted the wings savagely and suddenly tightened his turn. His crew could not see the death’s-head grin that clutched his face, an expression of vengeance and anguished hope and a desperate anxiety that came from seeing the whitecaps, not so much below his window as next to it. He was muttering a fat-grape pilot’s prayer: Follow me, you mother, follow me, down and around and down and—

A brief, violent flare lit the rearview mirror.

The silence of the cockpit seemed so profound to Alan that the whistle of air through the hole in the canopy was somehow outside it. He saw Christine’s interior with unearthly clarity—Craw’s silhouette, the screens, the gleam of his thermos.

Then he knew they had levelled off and were starting to climb.

The radar cuts from the A-5’s gun were gone.

Abruptly, Rafe punched his fist into the air over his head and gave a whoop. “Gotcha!”

Then, calmly, into the mike, he drawled, “Guardian, this is Gatoraid 2, splash one bandit, over,” and he laughed. And laughed. “We got him. I mean, we fucking got him!” He couldn’t seem to stop laughing.

Later, when he would tell this story to explain his Air Medal, he would lay his hand flat on the table and he would say, “You want to know how low I was? I was so low—I was so low that they had to scrape barnacles off Christine at the next maintenance check.” And he would pause, and smile, and a little of this same delighted laughter would burble out. “And you wanta know how low that A-5 Fantan was? On the bottom, ba-bee!”

“That was beautiful!” Narc crowed. There was no fawning in his voice. “Fucking beautiful.”

“What happened?” Senior Chief Craw asked. “Tomcat get him?”

“Rafe fuckin’ dumped him in the water,” Narc said. Rafe had managed to stop laughing. “He just went lower and slower till the raghead stalled.”

Rafe chuckled—not the release of tension any more, just amusement. “We got a kill,” he murmured. “An S-3 got a kill!”

They all began to laugh. More, and louder, and then Alan was pounding on Craw’s shoulder, and he realized what they had done. Rafe’s flying, yes, but also his knowledge and Craw and Narc.

Christine climbed the night, bullet holes whistling, content that she had killed again.

2335 Zulu. The Gulf.

Strike Common was a tangle of voices. Southern Iran was covered in a net of radar cuts, AAA, and SAM radars coming on and off. The IADS had done well for the first few minutes; Alan had missed the climax, when their AAA and SAMs came online; but the HARMs and the jamming were beating them now. He saw no more hostile aircraft; their leaker had been a loony or a lone night patrol.

Millions of dollars were spent in seconds as he heard HARM shots called on Common and watched radar sites go off the air. Most of the strike package was still over the target, but some A-6s had already turned for home, and Alan found one only twenty miles southeast of them. He hooked it and found that it was limping along at only a thousand feet.

“What’s happening out there?” Rafe asked. He and Narc had assessed their damage and decided they could still give gas. That they were there, flying, doing routine, seemed an anticlimax; yet, astonishing as the attack and their survival had been, it was for the routine that they were there.

“We got one wounded bird coming in,” Alan said, “eighteen miles out and wrong IFF but he’s low and slow and on his radial. Try and raise him on Common. Maybe needs gas to land.”

Narc got the Hawkeye on comm. Alan’s guess was confirmed: northern strike lead in a wounded bird, thought he could land it, needed gas at a low altitude. Rafe nodded; after going almost underwater to down the Fantan, he figured he could give gas while taxiing, and Christine’s fuel leak didn’t worry him. They rogered up and turned southeast, headed to intercept.

Alan was entranced with the electronic images of the raid, rapt, watching the Iranian IADS fall apart. The target EW sites and their protective SAMs went down under the strike packages and did not come back up as the strike came off target. There was a two-hundred-mile gap in the IADS. If they could get a plane that far, Alan thought, the Bahrainis could bomb Tehran now.

“Hey, Spy, get the FLIR online. I want to know how bad off this guy is. He doesn’t have radio.”

The FLIR is an infrared camera for watching surface targets, particularly surfaced submarines, at night. Bored S-3 crews on training hops use it to watch junior fighter jocks make fools of themselves trying to get their fuel probes into the basket at the end of the refueling hose. Now, Alan switched to it from the raid with regret. He couldn’t watch the strike and FLIR at the same time; they both came up on the same screen.

Air-to-air refueling is an art at the best of times. Pilots try to perfect the technique against the day they really need the gas. Good aircrews practice no-comms refueling, using signals passed by flashlight and by aircraft lights. Yet, it is hard enough to maneuver a high-speed aircraft so that the attached fuel probe locks into the much slower tanker’s basket; with the plane damaged, the pilot injured, it becomes torture.

Rafe made a good rendezvous with the wounded aircraft, an A-6 with a gash up the starboard side that went right through the cockpit.

Narc said, “He’ll need about five thousand,” and started to work the refueling computer. “Spy, have I got a basket out there?”

Alan got the basket dead center in the FLIR. “Bigger than life.” He was still thinking of the raid. The urgency of the A-5 attack on them, the abrupt release, had left him unfocused.

He did not hear the change in Narc’s voice as he cut the lights and said, “Oh, shit.” Then, “He’s hit bad. Losing power.” His tone was odd, but Alan did not register it. Only later would he learn that both men in the front end had seen the injured aircraft’s side number and knew who it was.

Rafe growled, “Soon as he’s in the basket, we’ll descend a little, give him some more airspeed, start a slowwww turn toward the boat. We’ll get him home.”

Poor sonofabitch, he was thinking. He meant Alan, not the wounded pilot.

Alan saw an infrared image of the A-6 pull into his field of view and realized that it was missing part of its canopy. The shock of it pulled him from his apathy, and he thought, This guy is hurt bad, and he began to function again. He was so intent then trying to figure out if the BN was still in the cockpit that seconds passed before he caught the glow of the pilot’s helmet, the head bent far forward.

Volleyball net. A-6.

Dad.

The wounded bird plowed forward toward the basket but lost altitude. The probe missed, and the basket banged the A-6 windscreen. Invisible to Alan in the dark, Craw flipped on the camera attached to the FLIR.

Alan, cold, said, “He’s losing it. He can’t hold his altitude.” The A-6’s movements had a dreamlike quality now, too slow, silent, eerily altered by the FLIR’s infrared. It seemed impossible that he was watching his father try to save himself. It seemed impossible that they were not back on the carrier, the mission over. Where was routine?

Rafe took Christine into a shallow dive. He was sure he could still save this one, get him his gas, get them all home. Fourteen hundred feet now; he had almost a minute to get him in the basket. He crawled. Surely bad things could not happen now.

Alan watched his father try again. In the slow dive, he came on straight and sure, but fifty feet from the basket something happened and the A-6 gave a shudder and disappeared from the screen again.

Alan whirled the FLIR back and forth until he found the aircraft again, now off to the left and right wing high. Slowly he tracked its attempts to try another pass.

Closer.

Seconds passed. The A-6 got a lineup and came on.

The probe was out. Alan’s whole will tried to force the probe into the basket. The A-6 seemed to be flying through jelly, barely responsive, lazy. Slowly, slowly, the probe drifted closer.

Suddenly the probe was there there THERE and the basket sailed dead in front of it and it came on the last few feet and it was in.

“He’s in!” Alan shouted, and he heard Craw call something at the same time. He tried to relax his grip on the seat. It’s okay, he thought. It’s okay. Then, as the fuel hit the wounded bird, triumph faded.

Christine gave a shudder. They were four hundred feet off the water and the A-6 had pulled the basket right off the hose. Fuel was raining down to the dark water, falling like blood from an artery, like lost opportunities, lost hopes.

He thought the A-6 started to fall away then, and that would always be the image that he had of it—getting smaller, dropping slowly—but he would wonder later if that was only an image in his mind, the horror of a dream where the inevitable, the terrifying, takes form.

What Alan saw for sure, and knew he saw, knew that this really happened then, was his father raise his head and lift one hand in a gesture, half wave, half salute. Does he know it’s me? Does he know I’m here? Then the head went down and the A-6 dropped like a stone.

An ejection seat fired, and a second later the plane hit the water.

“He’s gone,” he heard himself say. “He’s gone.”

He flipped back to the datalink.

Christine was silent. Then Narc began to report the downed bird.

6
24 July 1990. 2123 Zulu. Florida.

Kim Hoyt had been doing small hits of coke since lunch and she wanted a party. It was pretty much a party already—her brother and two of his friends, her father, two business guys of his who had brought the coke as a sweetener for some deal they were making—but she wanted glitter and splash with it. She wanted to dress up and she wanted to strip naked; she wanted to be admired and she wanted to flirt; she wanted to be coveted and she wanted to be competed for. She wanted to be the center of something exciting, and that said to her a party.

Her father made deals. Mostly, his deals were in construction, condos and hotels, packaging and subcontracting, heavy in the part of the Cuban community where the money was. She admired her father. He was her model for a man: he could twist other men around each other, and he could make big money. Physically, he wasn’t much—paunchy and soft-looking, smooth, barbered—but she had already learned what a lot of young men didn’t know yet, that a middle-aged man like her father was more attractive than they were with their sunbleached hair and their muscles, because he gave off signs of power. If all you wanted was to get fucked, they were okay. “Put a sock in their mouth, they’re fine,” as she said to her friends. But she knew there was more to life than that. She knew that unless you wanted to be some overweight slob with cellulite and three kids and a mortgage, you wanted power and you wanted money.

So Kim loved her father. Almost beyond what was allowed, but they never crossed that line.

She lay by the pool, loving the coke, loving herself, the smooth honey of her skin, the reflection of herself in all the others’ eyes. Three other women were around the pool, too, but they weren’t competition; they were playmates for the businessmen. She felt distanced from them by her promise to Alan. She was his. She’d be all his, only his. She loved her celibacy, all the more because she was the most desirable woman there. She loved their desire, even the other women’s, their desire expressed as envy but desire all the same.

“Telephone, mees.”

Consuela was a black silhouette against the sky, bending toward her like an angel.

“Bring it out here.”

She believed that she and Consuela were buddies. Consuela loved her, she believed.

“I teenk ees heem, mees. Maybe you want private?”

Him. Alan. Consuela knew all about him. (So did her father, for that matter, but in a different way, not the sex—at least not the intensity of it—which Consuela cleaned up after.) “Oh, my God—” The coke gave her tremendous focus, mostly on herself, her feelings (lust, loneliness) and she ran across the tiles, feeling her breasts move, feeling all the others’ eyes on her. “In my bedroom, Consuela—”

She threw herself across the pink bed, grabbed the phone. “Yes?” Her heart was thumping.

“It’s Alan.”

“It is you! Oh, my God, I miss you so! You got my vibes, you felt me missing you, didn’t you! I thought I’d come in my—”

“Kim!” It was a new tone from him; maybe it was the telephone. He sounded uptight. As if he wasn’t listening to her at all. “Kim, I’m coming home for a few days.”

“You’re not!” She shrieked the words. She rolled on her back. She crossed an ankle over a knee. “Oh, lover, when you—”

“Kim, my father’s dead.”

She felt herself go through three distinct stages in a fraction of a second; the coke let her see them clearly. First, annoyance that he would mention such a thing just then; next, fear that something was expected of her; then, heavy, conventional sadness of the kind she saw on television. She began to weep. “Oh—my darling—oh, poor you, I’m so sorry, oh God—”

“I have to settle his affairs. I’ve got compassionate leave. I’m flying commercial; can you meet my plane?”

She wanted to say that she’d be waiting with her legs spread, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear (she felt annoyance again, then something stronger than that), and she assured him she’d be there. She wrote the details on her pad, her writing too large, later hard to read. She was still weeping. The tears felt good, a letting-go. It was nice to cry for somebody’s dead dad, she found.

“I’ve got to go.”

“But you poor thing. Oh, your heart must be broken! The depth—I mean, this is just so sad. I wish I could tell you how I feel it. So—so—” She wept and wept. She couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop, loved herself weeping.

But the more she tried to tell him how sad it was, the less he seemed to respond. She wanted him there with her, seeing her weep, making love, weeping and making love at the same time, and she tried to tell him this, tried to get him to see, but he said less and less and less.

Then she was holding a dead telephone.

It made her weep even more. She couldn’t stop. Everything was just so sad.

Her brother’s friend came into the room and shut the door. He was dumb as a stump but gorgeous, hardly eighteen. She told him how sad it was. He told her she had really deep feelings and began to unfasten her bikini top. That felt right to her.

26 July 1990. 1322 Zulu. Florida.

Alan Craik hadn’t slept the three nights since he had watched his father’s plane fall away. He was wound up tight with fatigue, his eyes too bright; he made quick movements that didn’t quite do what they were supposed to do, stumbled sometimes. Yet he was alert, and when he lay down and closed his eyes, he remained awake, replaying the horror of it.

As the 747 dropped toward Orlando, he stared out the window, as if seeing Florida rise up to meet him was important. He was not seeing Florida at all, however; he was seeing meetings with his father, a last one when he had said goodbye in Bahrain. Death hadn’t given them any premonition that it would be the last time. They had been casual, too quick; he had still been nursing resentment at his father’s remarks about Kim, and his father had been anxious to deal with squadron business.

Alan Craik was confused. He had not known his father well, he decided; was that his own fault? His father had let his mother and stepfather raise him; what did he owe his father’s memory, then? Had his father been a good man? A hero? A model? Where was Alan’s responsibility to his memory? And where was Alan’s part in his death?

“It wasn’t your fault!” Rafehausen had shouted at him. Alan had stood on the flight deck, the warm air of the Gulf washing over him, babbling, “It was my fault. I killed him. They should have had a real aircrewman up there. I killed my father—” Until Rafehausen had grabbed him and bellowed at him, “It wasn’t your fault! It wasn’t your goddam fault! You did everything you could!”

He replayed the last moments of his father’s life as the 747 put down. He saw the final gesture, that raised hand before the plane plunged to the water—had that been corny, or was it gallant? And what was he, Alan, in those moments? And where was grief, which, he thought, should have had him weeping, when actually he was alert and efficient and, after those moments of guilt, hard as a stone? Then he began to replay it all as a way of moving to the edge of his consciousness a question that wanted to intrude: With him dead, why am I staying in the Navy?

He was wearing civilian clothes and had only a knapsack. He came out into the arrival lounge, dodging other travelers who planted themselves wherever their welcomers waited, and Kim was standing at the far side, her back against a pillar, and he smiled automatically, as he did most things automatically just then. She was wearing a black dress and sunglasses and looked tragic and sexy, and it took him an instant to realize that he resented the way she looked, which seemed to require that he be Alan, Kim’s Lover, and not Alan, Mick’s Son. Or simply Alan.

“My poor love,” she whispered in his ear. “I am so sorry.” She held him just the right length of time and then let go. “Are you terribly hurt?” she murmured.

“I’m fine.”

They walked all the way to her car before she spoke again. She held his hand very tight; he knew he was supposed to feel support, love, comfort flowing from her fingers. In fact, he felt nothing. He knew he should not tell her so.

“We’re putting you in one of the cabanas,” she said across the roof of her Mercedes. “We’ll have to find someplace else for us.”

“I’ll be at my Dad’s house a lot. All his stuff—”

She accepted it. Still, driving out of the airport, she said, “I am going to see you, aren’t I?”

“Jesus, of course.”

“I’ve missed you so.”

“I’ve missed you, too.”

He tried to blot the pictures from his mind and to think of something to say to her, and he said, “Thanks for the letters. They really kept me going.” She had sometimes sent him two a day, always short, not very literate, the envelopes stuffed with mementoes—a scrap of black nylon, something cut from a newspaper, a joke. He had been charmed by them, often aroused, then grew a little weary of their relentless, one-note sexual cheerfulness. They were like directives ordering the world to be happy and start fucking.

He let one hand rest on her thigh as she drove. The black dress was very short; under it was a black slip, then her bare, golden thigh.

“Want to go somewhere?” she said.

“Where?” He had slipped into thinking of his father’s death again.

“Don’t you want me?”

“I want whatever you want.”

She bit her lower lip. The sunglasses were as big as beer-can lids and hid half her face. After a long time, her voice level, she said, “I have something to tell you, when you’re ready to talk. It’s something wonderful, but you’re not ready yet and I don’t want to spoil it. Okay?”

“Okay.” He had been thinking about Rafehausen’s shouting at him.

She pulled into a motel, got them a room, and led him inside. Desire surprised him, its intensity like something that had been lying in wait. His lovemaking was humorless and driven, separate from his mind so that he was a kind of onlooker; yet there was physical relief, and the sense of pleasing her.

“You’ve changed,” she said. She cradled his head. “My poor lover. Want to share it with me?”

“What?”

Tears filled her eyes. “Don’t I mean anything to you?” She wept. “I can’t get through to you!” He saw that he was supposed to comfort her, tried, turned it to sex, and became again humorless and driven.

1600 Zulu. Tehran.

Franci will not remember that he is awake sometimes. He will remember things after the sixth day; this is only the fourth day. Yet, he already knows that he has lost one leg. He does not know how he knows it. In fact, a doctor stood by his bed and told another doctor; he has forgotten the event, but his mind has seized the fact. Already, his brain is working on being a different person—no longer young, no longer whole, no longer full of life and promise. He is deadened with drugs and he seems unconscious, but his brain is working on the proposition that a few seconds at the radar post, the flipping of a switch, somebody else’s callousness, have stolen his future. He has not yet been told that he is a eunuch.

1600 Zulu. Florida.

His father owned a house near Five Points in Jacksonville. Alan remembered it from visits after the divorce. His mother had waited a year and then married a nice guy from Iowa, and Alan had visited his father during two humid Florida summers. Then his father had had other duty stations, but he liked Florida and kept the house.

Part of it was rented to a j.g. from another squadron. When Alan’s father was there, they shared the house; when either was away, he locked his bedroom and that was that. A succession of such housemates had trooped through, leaving the house anonymous and male.

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