GORDON KENT
PEACEMAKER

Dedication

For those who serve in secret.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part One: The Friends

1

2

3

Part Two: Turning the Wheel

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

Part Three: The Ignorant Armies

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Part Four: Weapons Free

36

37

38

39

40

Coda: The Friends

Keep Reading

About the Author

Praise

Also by Gordon Kent

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

April 6, 1994

Zulu wore sunglasses and camo fatigues, and he had a star on each collar point that winked in the sunlight. These were not the first things you noticed, at least not as soon as you got close. What you noticed first was that somebody had tried to cut his nose off with a hard downward stroke from above, perhaps as if the blade had struck a helmet first and been deflected a little and gone into the hard bone of his nose almost at the bridge and taken out a chunk of it. Now he had a nose that looked in profile like a child’s idea of a witch’s nose, a nose that started too far down his face and came straight out before plunging downward. Some people winced when they first saw that nose.

His real name was not Zulu. Nor was it the name on his passport. The men with him simply called him Z.

He had four men with him, also in camo, men like him who were too pale to have been in the sun for long. He spoke to them in French, but, because one of the four had to translate for the others into another language, it seemed that the French was, like their Belgian uniforms, something false. All five men carried side arms and grenades, and they had things like NATO battle helmets and Kevlar vests and fanny packs that they had put on the ground nearby because it was so hot. They had the air of men who were in some place of transit—say, an airport—and who were used to not caring where they were because they would soon be somewhere else. They lit cigarettes and looked around and waited.

Elizabeth Momparu was too shrewd to hang back from the white men, even though she was the only woman. If she isolated herself, even from apparent shyness, she would be noticed that much more. Not that she could be easily ignored; she was a big woman, tall and robust, heavy-boned. People noticed her. Here, the African men noticed her with particular clarity because she was the daughter of a general, a Hutu, and half-sister to Peter Ntarinada, who was a big man in his own right. The European men noticed her because she was good-looking. A green dress that showed off her breasts and hips didn’t hurt.

“Peter!” she called. She put laughter into her voice. She made more of the difficulty she was having with high heels and the soft earth out here. Her half-brother turned his head but only made an impatient gesture with his hand. He had pushed himself into the group of Europeans, and he didn’t want some woman, even a half-sister, pulling him back out. Peter was aggressive—“proud,” Africans said—and very touchy, one of those people who can’t conceive of not using power if they have it. And he had some. And he would soon have more, if his plans worked.

Elizabeth Momparu laughed loud enough for the clusters of men to hear. There was a black cluster and a white cluster, with Peter the only one who had crossed from one cluster to the other. Still laughing, she tottered to join him. Peter turned again and scowled at her. She laughed.

They were gathered around the man named Zulu, who was speaking in a language Elizabeth didn’t understand to two white men in Belgian uniforms. Elizabeth didn’t believe for a moment that they were Belgian, and she didn’t believe Zulu was French, but she didn’t say so. She merely smiled into Zulu’s dark sunglasses and ignored his maimed nose.

The sunglasses stared back at her. Where were the eyes? Zulu looked down at the two “Belgians.” He said something, and the men began to unzip two long nylon bags. Elizabeth knew they were ski bags, because she’d been skiing in Switzerland, but she knew, too, that they didn’t hold skis. Not in Rwanda.

Another man in a Belgian uniform was murmuring into a radio. He had a short antenna strung, and equipment laid out on a plastic tarpaulin, and he listened and then called something to Zulu and held up a hand, the fingers spread, and opened and closed them once, twice. Ten.

“Ten minutes,” Zulu said to Peter. Peter squinted into the sky. He looked at Elizabeth, still squinting. “Keep out of the way,” he said in French.

But she moved in closer and watched one of the “Belgians” begin to take pieces of metal out of the ski bag. He began to assemble them. Elizabeth knew that he was putting together a missile launcher; she knew that much from having lived through a war, but she didn’t know that it was a shoulder-fired American Stinger.

“You want to help?” Zulu said to her. His voice was uncannily low, and he had an accent that she thought was either American or German. He had been pleasant to her at dinner last night and afterward in bed, and he was being merely pleasant now, perhaps letting his need for her brother’s help attach to her.

“Oh, yes!” she said. She didn’t feel that enthusiastic, but she thought that enthusiasm was called for.

Zulu took a camera from a bag at his feet. She saw at once that it was a very expensive camera but not of a kind she knew, very flat, square. She recognized the brand name, however. “Oh!” she said, “I have a Canon, too. A cute little one.” She began to burrow in her shoulder bag for it.

“This is, I think, the only camera of its kind in Africa.” He surprised her by sounding boastful. Odd, such a petty thing in a man who, according to her brother, was so important. Yet, he seemed childishly pleased at showing her his digital camera and how it worked.

“No film?” she said. She tried to make herself seem as stupid as possible—her “Marilyn Monroe act,” as she called it.

“No film. No laboratory. I print from my computer.”

“Your computer! Oh, wild! Oh!” But he was immune to the Monroe thing. It was the camera and the computer that turned him on. He showed her how to work it and then said, “Your part is to take pictures of me. You will be the official historian.” His lips smiled. He was used to dealing with men, she thought. This was how he got men to do things. Things like coming to Rwanda and wearing a Belgian uniform and firing a Stinger missile? Yes, almost assuredly so.

Zulu posed with her brother, his white arm around Peter’s black neck, his face turned up to the sky. She took the picture. Zulu posed, one foot up on a log, pointing toward a cloud. Zulu went and stood among the Africans and posed, seeming to be explaining something to them. The men were all her brother’s soldiers, Hutus, all armed with Heckler & Koch assault rifles, all in camo fatigues and bush hats; now Zulu posed them, one by one, as if he were directing a play, until they stood in a tight group, rifles at the ready, looking this way and that as if on guard. Elizabeth took the picture. It was an odd thing, such an ugly man being so vain, but she knew that he was.

Would she dare try it with her own camera? Better now than later, she thought. She took it out. It was bright pink, hardly something you would seem to be trying to hide. She raised it to her eye. She framed a couple of the soldiers.

“Wait!” Zulu shouted.

She froze, the viewfinder at her eye. She couldn’t see him in the viewfinder, so she turned her head to the left, seeing a small rectangle of the world swing by, and there he was. Was he angry? Was he going to do something to her?

“I’m not ready,” he said. He ran a hand over his hair and went to the black men, her viewfinder tracking him, and he took the assault rifle from one of them and pointed it into the bush. “Ready,” he said, turning his profile so his witch’s nose was silhouetted against the shadows. She snapped the picture.

“Okay?” she said brightly.

“Now with my camera, please.”

She took that one.

“Now like this.” He swung the weapon around and aimed it at her. Right at her face. Right at the camera. One of the Africans laughed, and then he got next to Zulu and pointed his rifle, and then a couple of the others came and then all of them, a dozen, and they stood there, some shaking with laughter, aiming their rifles at her until she took the picture with both cameras. The rifles were loaded, she knew.

Then the radioman shouted something, and Zulu busied himself with the two men who had the missile launchers. He slapped one on the shoulder and trotted over to Elizabeth. “Get pictures when I tell you.” He touched her little pink camera. “Put that one away.”

“Just one more?” she pleaded. Dipping her knees as children do, making herself smaller.

“Make it quick.”

He headed for the radioman, and she snapped one hurriedly, trying to get him and the two shooters; she cycled the film and stepped back, hoping one of them would raise the launcher to his shoulder, but they were busy on the ground.

“Put that thing away!” a voice said behind her. Her brother.

“He said I could take one more.” She bounced up and down on her toes.

“This is serious business, Elizabeth! Don’t you know what’s going on here?”

“It’s a déjeuner sur l’herbe, isn’t it? A peek-neek?” She gave him a foolish grin. “I’m not an idiot, Peter.”

“I don’t like you taking pictures.”

“He asked me to take them! And anyway, if you have your way, it won’t matter what pictures have been taken, will it? Besides which, they’re all supposed to be Belgians, so what does it signify?”

The Belgians were in Rwanda as peacekeepers. So were the French. Twenty-five hundred of them, keeping “peace” since last August in a country already up to its knees in blood. Now her brother was involved in something designed to start the horrors up again. She knew a lot about it; she was part of the Hutu elite, always on the edges of discussions and meetings. She was trusted because she was a general’s daughter and Peter’s half-sister, and because all her life she had had privileges and luxuries beyond most of her countrymen’s wildest dreams.

“Put that camera away now!” he hissed. Zulu was shouting at his men. Somebody was running.

“Oh—poo!” she said. She snapped a picture of Peter looking furious, then swung the camera around and got one of the “Belgians” as he raised the launcher. Then she gave her half-brother a big grin and made a show of dropping the pink camera into her bag and zipping it closed. She laughed into his angry face, then minced across the soft earth, her beautifully coiffed hair bouncing, Zulu’s digital camera held like a jewel between her fingers.

Zulu was gesturing at the Rwandan soldiers, spreading them out. “All the way around us!” he shouted. “Both sides! When I tell you, you go! We get out very quick when this is over!” He looked for Peter, found him. “Get them out another fifty meters or so! A big perimeter—I don’t want any interference—” He looked around again. “Where’s my camera? Ah—” He ran to Elizabeth. “I’ll take it now. No, wait—get one shot of me and the guys—”

He crouched behind the two shooters, who had their backs to her with the launchers pointed into the sky to the north. “Okay—take the picture—Good. One more—” He changed his position, waved her around so she was getting him in profile again, cheating a little so his face, his nose showed as he seemed to be directing the two shooters. “Got it? Give me the camera. Many thanks.” He gave her the smile again, the smile that worked on the men and didn’t work on her. “Well done.” Then he was back with the shooters, speaking to them in the other language.

And then she could hear the aircraft. At first, it was an almost subliminal rumble, then a soft roar that diminished into a hiss and a sigh, with a thin screaming of air over wings beginning to descend above the other sounds. She stared into the north sky. The morning clouds had piled up but not delivered their rain; it would pass over them now and fall somewhere to the east. The clouds were bright enough to hurt her eyes; she squinted, trying to make the aircraft out above the trees. She prayed it wouldn’t be the civilian plane. Make it military, she prayed. Make it the UN. Even the French or the Belgians. It could be that it was them they meant to hit. That could be the strategy, to down a UN plane, stir things up. Not the other, she prayed. If it was the other, then they would all be in hell.

Zulu rapped out a word, and one of the shooters set his rear foot and hunched. Zulu had seen the aircraft, and she tried to find it in the brightness of cloud. Where? She was looking too far ahead, of course; she was deceived by the sound.

“There it is,” Peter said. The others had already seen it.

Then she saw it, too, surprisingly clear and close. It was a civilian 747. Please, no, God, she prayed.

The aircraft came on, dropping, on its final approach now for the Kigali airport. The thin scream of the wind cut into her ears. She covered them, screwed her face up, a frightened child.

One Stinger whooshed and roared and smoked from the tube. She followed its trajectory as it seemed to curve away from the aircraft. Miss, miss, dear God, she prayed. The trail curled and then swung more tightly up. It seemed to hang there for a long time. They missed, she thought. The airliner was screaming down the glide path to their left, dropping toward the trees, and the missile was invisible. Seeking, seeking the aircraft’s heat—

And then it hit. The aircraft erupted. A ball of light blew out of its roof, although the craft seemed for a moment to remain intact, to go on flying. Then flame and smoke spread from that white-hot center, and the tail section, independent now, began to fall. The front was almost entirely obscured by flash and fire; another explosion tore it apart; a wing and an engine seemed to slide sideways across the sky, and the fireball plunged.

She found that she was standing on her toes, one hand clasped over her mouth. She was weeping. Peter was shaking her and pulling her away. “Weakling!” he shouted at her. “Weakling! You stupid bitch!”

Everyone aboard the civilian flight, including the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, was killed. Both were Hutus. Tutsi rebels were blamed.

Then ten Belgian peacekeepers were killed by Rwandan presidential guards.

Then Hutus began to kill Tutsis. The killings were not random. On April fifteenth, more than a thousand Tutsis were murdered in a church by men throwing grenades. By April twenty-seventh, a hundred thousand on both sides were dead. Then the Hutu strategy backfired, and by August the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front was in power in Rwanda, and somewhere between half a million and a million Hutus had become refugees in other countries, mainly Zaire.

The man called Zulu was not there. He had flown out the same day as the downing of the presidents’ aircraft. After refueling at Abeche in Chad, an ancient Britannia 252 took him up to the edge of the Mediterranean at Tubruq, then to the military airport south of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. “Zulu” became somebody else who had his own training camp and weapons depot south of the city and whom the authorities in Belgrade feared and disliked, but without whom they could not achieve the ethnic victory in their own country on which their political lives depended.

Part One The Friends

1

Bosnia, February 1996

The sea was gray, the sky near the horizon pink, between them a line of silver. It looked as cold as dawn in Canada, but this was the Mediterranean in February. Cold.

He felt the bucking of the aircraft, under it the surge of the deck, under that the throb of the ship, felt these things without feeling them because he had been there so long these were normal, and when he got on shore the lack of vibration would feel wrong, something missing in the universe.

“Ready back there, Lieutenant?”

Fatigue perched on him like a big, obscene bird. Crow picking at roadkill. He roused himself, realized he had been half-asleep, the pilot’s voice in the comm waking him. Was he ready? Ready for one more of Suter’s punitive jobs, one more of his humiliations, one more of his demonstrations that he, Suter, was a lieutenant-commander and Alan Craik was only a lieutenant and it had been a big mistake for Alan to show that he thought Suter was an asshole?

“Yo,” he said.

“O-kay! And they’re off, as the monkey said—”

When he backed into the lawnmower, Alan finished for him. The puck dropped and the cat whacked him in the chest with Gs and the aircraft threw itself at the horizon. It was like the old days for a moment, and he felt the thrill of it, and then it was gone.

They flew into the rising sun, up toward thin strands of cloud like combed-out hair. Alan Craik looked back and saw the carrier, already small, a destroyer just visible in the haze a couple of miles away. Bitterly, he thought that he was off to do an ensign’s job, and behind him on the ship Ensign Baronik would be trying to do Alan’s job and screwing it up because he was only an ensign, and LCDR Suter would be on him like a weasel on a chicken, pleased that this nice piece of warm meat was there for him to savage. Ensign Baronik hadn’t been savvy enough to put space between himself and Alan, and so he was warm meat by association. And he was too young and too scared to tell Suter to back off, as Alan had done.

Alan sighed. God, he was tired. Four hours’ sleep in three days and now this. A lose-lose situation: if he didn’t work his ass off, Suter gave him every shit detail that came along; if he did work his ass off, Suter took the credit—and gave him every shit detail that came along. For Alan, who loved the job and for whom work was life, it was better to work himself to death and know that at least he’d done his best, but helping Suter’s career was bitter medicine. And it was made worse by Suter’s having control of his life—of his orders, of his job, of his fitness reports. And Suter hated him. “You’re supposed to be God’s wet dream,” Suter had hissed at him. “You’re supposed to be hot shit, Craik, and I know you’re not! I see through you! You’re just luck and bullshit wrapped with a ribbon, and I’m gonna untie it. People been hanging medals on you like Christmas ornaments—well, no more, mister. No more! You’re not even gonna get close to glory this trip—no way!”

What was worse, Suter was good at his job. And smart.

“You wanna sleep back there, Lieutenant, go ahead. We got a couple hours, no scenery.”

“Would you ask the stewardess to turn down my bed?” Alan said.

“Jeez, I would, but she’s busy in first class just now.”

Alan smiled, the smile of habit, the sea-duty smile. He started to think about his wife, and home, and what it would be like when this rotten tour was over. He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he was aware of was the pilot telling him they were five minutes from going dry and he could wake up now.

“Must have dozed off.”

“Hey, I thought I had a corpse back there! Feet-dry in four minutes, man. We’re coming in over the islands now—” He started to give a guided tour but clicked off to deal with the comm. Alan consulted his own kneepad: Split was off somewhere in the haze to his left; to his right would be Dubrovnik, down along the coast that was now like a smudge from a dirty thumb. Directly underneath, the island of Brac, one of a series of former resorts that step-stoned down the coast to Dubrovnik. Not resorts now, he thought. He had no intel of fighting down there, but the war had been everywhere, the gruesome agony of a nation turned in on itself. Down there were perhaps only shuttered hotels and distrust; ahead on the mainland were horrors. He had already seen some of them. A so-called “peace accord” had been signed a few weeks before, but people who looked alike and had a common history and common problems were still killing each other, like a trapped animal chewing off its own leg.

The weather inland was lousy. Sarajevo was socked in, as usual. The UN food flights had just ended, and NATO had taken over the airfield. Alan watched the cloud tops, felt his eyes close, nodded forward—

“Cleared for landing. Check your straps, Lieutenant. You know how this goes—ejection position SOP. Make ready—” He felt the familiar turn and sink, deceleration, pressure as he came against the straps, but nothing like a carrier landing—no hook here, and a runway long enough to land a commercial jet. Alan saw the too-close bulk of Mount Igman, acres of dirty snow, low, dark cloud cover obscuring dark slopes, houses flashing underneath, a burned-out car—

A bang and a screech and they swiveled a degree and back and were down. A radar installation flashed past, two trucks angled to it in a plowed space, high snowbanks all around, a French logo. The plane was rolling now, no longer seeming to scream; they swung left into a taxiway, slowed some more and began the long taxi to the intake building. When Alan climbed down, a cold, wet wind slapped at him: welcome to Yugoslavia.

He blew out his breath. Six hours here. To do ten minutes of an ensign’s work. As he humped his pack toward the warehouse building that served IFOR as a local HQ, it started to snow.

The French officer signed for his package and gave him coffee (damned good—bitter, fresh) and asked him to stay to lunch (also damned good, probably, with wine), but a Canadian major with the worried look of an old monkey looked through a doorway and shouted, “That Craik?”

The Frenchman grimaced, winked at Alan. “Just arrived, Major.”

“In here, Craik.” The worry lines deepened and the major turned away, then looked back and said, “Welcome and—so on. Kind of a mess.”

Alan was supposed to sit for six hours and then get a lift to Aviano, sit for four hours, and then get something that might put him near the carrier. Suter’s idea. Nothing was supposed to happen here except turning over a lot of clapped-out aerial photos. “Uh—” he said stupidly at the retreating back, “—my orders have me going to—”

“Orders have been changed!” the voice floated back.

Suter again?

Alan shrugged himself deeper into his exhaustion and went through the door where the major had disappeared. There was a battered corridor, black slush on the floor, hand-lettered signs on pieces of notebook paper drooping from map pins like old flags—“G-3,” “S&R,” “Liaison.” He passed a makeshift bulletin board, most of the postings in both English and French. Well, they were Canadians, after all. At the top of the bulletin board, it said “UNPROFOR,” the acronym of the UN Protection Force that was in the process of pulling out.

“In here!” The major sat in a tiny office that had been a toilet before the sinks were ripped out. An unusable commode was almost hidden by a pile of pubs. “Francourt, Major, Canadian army. You know about all that.” He handed over some message traffic: his orders. Alan’s eyes flashed down it—“… temporary duty … CO UNPROFOR/CO IFOR Sarajevo… liaison and intelligence support and acquisition …” What was this shit?

The major was talking again. “You know UNPROFOR, what we do—?”

“I thought you were IFOR.”

The major shook his head. “UNPROFOR. We’re going, they’re coming.” He jerked his head toward the front of the building where the French officer was. “Unfortunately, some of us are still here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“French and Canadians down here, mostly us and the Italians up above.” He looked at Alan. “Tuzla.” That was “up above,” he meant. There had been a lot of fighting. “We were keeping the peace, ha-ha. You know all that. It says here you speak this African Kissy-willy, that right?” He rattled a piece of paper.

“Kiswahili? A little—”

“Good. And Italian, it says. Good, just the guy I want. We got a problem up there, I don’t follow it, but there’s a Kenyan medical unit making a hell of a noise, and I haven’t got time to deal with it. You’ve been asked for. Dick Murch—know him?”

His mind was slow because of no sleep, and it was all coming too fast—Yugoslavia, winter, snow, then all of a sudden Kenyans and Swahili. Murch. “Murch. Yeah—Canadian Army intel—”

“He asked for you by name.” The major rattled the paper again. “Your boss messaged us you’re just the man for the job.” The major, a man with decent feelings, glanced a little unbelievingly at Alan. It would be, after all, a shitty job, whatever it was—cold, uncomfortable, fruitless. Alan saw the major understand that Alan’s boss hated his guts. The major’s voice was almost apologetic: “Well—won’t last long. And it’s just being a good listener, eh? And you can take those photos you brought in right up to Murch and save us a step.”

Well, Alan thought, at least there would be wine with lunch before he left.

“There’s a plane going up in—well, it was supposed to leave a half-hour ago, but they never get out on time. One of yours.” He meant that the US had re-opened the airport at Tuzla and was moving there in a big way. Alan doubted the jab about being late; the Air Force, like the Navy, ran a tight operation. The major was just pissed because he was still here. “Dalembert’ll show you which one.” There went wine with lunch. And lunch, probably. A voice in his head said, This is another fine mess you’ve got us into! The voice would have been Harry O’Neill’s, doing one of his imitations. God, he wished O’Neill was with him! The bond of friendship would have got him through this crap. He and O’Neill had been two first-tour IOs together five years ago, winning the Gulf War on brilliance and brashness (with a little help from some pilots). O’Neill would have known how to deal with Suter. O’Neill would have known how to deal with Alan, for that matter. You’re good, Shweetheart—you’re really good—

“Got a weapon?” the major said.

Weapon. Weapon? Alan had to concentrate. “Got an armpit gun in my pack.”

“Wear it. They’re shooting at us up there. I mean, at us. Take off your rank, anything shiny.” He held up a finger. “Lesson: If you try to help some poor sonofabitch who’s being killed by his brother, they’ll both kill you, instead.” He made a gun with his hands and pretended to squint into a sight.

Alan gave another long, fatigued sigh. He unstrapped the pack and began to feel for the Browning nine-millimeter. This was a fine mess.

Fort MacArthur, North Carolina.

The Georgian brick buildings, the green lawns and the old trees looked like a university campus. The classroom looked like a university classroom. The students, in their thirties and forties, might have been university graduate students. But they weren’t. This was the toughest school in America, with the highest rate of flunkout, dropout, and just plain exhaustion. This was what people inside the intelligence community called the Ranch.

Harry O’Neill sat relaxed at one of the student desks. Unlike the rest, he was attentive to the briefing on Africa. The rest were in body positions that suggested that Africa didn’t exist for them. The teacher, himself a case officer no longer active, was pointing a laser pointer at a map with the outlines of countries but no names and asking questions with the resigned tone of a man who knew that he wouldn’t get answers.

“What’s this?” he snapped. When there was no answer, he said, “O’Neill?”

“Rwanda,” O’Neill murmured.

“This?” Silence. He nodded at Harry. O’Neill said, “Burundi.”

The bright dot moved. The teacher waited, flicked an eye at O’Neill. “Zaire.” Then, “Central African Republic. Chad—”

The teacher snapped the pointer off and leaned his butt back against a table, arms crossed, and said, “Okay, okay. You know what’s going on there? Want to do a little central African brief off the cuff, Mister O’Neill?”

Harry smiled. “Off the cuff, sir, let’s see—two years ago, there was a crash—some folks say a shootdown—of an aircraft with the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi aboard. All hell broke loose, with the two major ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, massacring each other. Tutsis came out on top, drove the Hutus into eastern Zaire, where they’re now living in big refugee camps that are being run by their own militias, who got out with their weapons and a big blood lust. When the other shoe drops, there’ll be hell all over again.”

“How come you know all this and the rest of these guys don’t, O’Neill?”

Before Harry could reply, a voice behind him said, low and with a snicker, “Cause dat’s his home, man!”

O’Neill was the only black man in the class.

The teacher snapped erect, face flushed. “All right—who said that—?”

But Harry O’Neill hadn’t stirred. He only smiled and said softly, “Oh, that’s okay, sir. I know who said it.”

When the class ended, most of them stirred and stretched, but a man named Richmond hurried out the door and started down the corridor. Harry O’Neill was just as fast, however; within a few strides, he had caught up and fallen in with the man, draping one arm around the other’s shoulders with what seemed perfect friendliness.

“Richmond, Richmond!” he said. He smiled. He squeezed Richmond’s shoulder. O’Neill had been both a Phi Beta Kappa and a starting defensive end at Harvard; the squeeze had authority. “Richmond, next week we have Close Combat Drill three times, did you know that? And, because I’m near the top of the class, I get to pick my partner, did you know that?” He gave another squeeze. “And Richmond—” His voice took on the same thick, fake-black tone that had been heard in the classroom. “Ah picks yew—man!”

Tuzla.

Alan tried to sleep on the short hop to Tuzla, but it was no good. They’d put him in a “crash-resistant” seat with enough straps to hold back Hulk Hogan, but they hadn’t given any thought to comfort. Most of the huge aircraft was loaded with cargo. The French coffee had lifted him for a little, but that was gone now. He had already had the second surge that comes with real fatigue, the time of being wired, with crash to follow. Except he hadn’t been able to crash. At Tuzla, they made one big turn and went in, with another aircraft on the runway ahead of them and another right behind. Like cyclic ops. Alan tried to find an office for UNPROFOR and finally learned that what was left of it wasn’t at the airfield; it was beyond the city, and he’d need transport. It was like a demonstration of Murphy’s Law. Somebody found him a truck.

The driver was Italian, one of those people who dedicate their lives to not being impressed, so he was not impressed that Alan spoke Italian with a Neapolitan accent. Still, he was willing to talk, so long as it was clear to Alan that he was not impressed by officer rank, either. When they had gone a few kilometers, he stopped.

“Good place to piss,” he said in Italian. “No snipers.” Alan didn’t recognize the Italian word for “snipers” but got it from a pantomime. The second time somebody had pretended to shoot him that day. He got out, and they stood side by side. Lots of other trucks had stopped here for relief; the place was an outdoor toilet, in fact. He climbed back up into the cab, higher than climbing into the old S-3 he had flown in for two years, and they coughed and clanked along. It was an incomparably gloomy scene, as so many land-war scenes are, all dirty snow and mud and artillery damage, and one woman with no teeth and a head scarf and a cow-like stare, watching them go past. Early in the war, a mortar round had landed in a square in Tuzla and killed seventy-one people, most of them children.

The trucker dropped Alan at what had been the UNPROFOR HQ. That was not where Murch was, of course; Murch was in the intel center, in a former school three rubble-strewn blocks away. When Alan had finally humped his pack to the right doorless office, Murch looked at him and said, “Is this the best the States can send us? You look like the meat course in an MRE.”

“I’m wiped.”

“You’ll fit right in.” Murch looked worn out himself. Alan had met Murch a couple of months before down on the coast; they had done a job together and had hit it off. They had found a shared interest in fishing. Murch was convinced there would be fishing nearby when spring came. His only evidence was that Tito had been a fisherman. “Eaten?”

“Somebody gave me a box lunch. I think I ate it. The French were going to give me real food. With wine.”

“You want to be walked through the chow line first or you want to crash?” There were cartons and fiber barrels everywhere. Murch was in the middle of moving.

“I’m running on empty, man.”

Murch handed him a tan plastic cup of acidic coffee and said, “Ten minutes. Got to brief you. Then—” He looked at his watch. “You can get eight hours and you’ll be off.”

“What the hell is ‘off’?”

Murch jerked his thumb toward the sky. “Up the hill. We’ll give you a Humvee and a driver and a gunner. You’re going up on a peacekeeping mission—between the Italians and the Kenyans.”

Thirteen minutes later, he was asleep.

Eastern Zaire.

The air was damp from rain that had come out of season, making haloes around the gas lamps in the cinder-block building. Insects flew in and out of the haloes. Out in the camp, somebody laughed; somebody screamed. Peter Ntarinada, sitting in the building in the scruffy room he called his office, pushed the gift bottle of Glenlivet across the rickety table. “I want more money and I want more arms,” he said.

The Frenchman poured himself some whiskey. He gave a kind of shrug with one eyebrow. “We don’t give something for nothing, Colonel. Lascelles himself said that times are tight.”

“Something for nothing! Look how I’m living! Is this nothing?” Peter snatched the bottle back, poured more into his own glass. “I’m living like a peasant! I live in this fucking camp that is paved with shit because we don’t have toilets—you call that nothing? Anyway, when we get back into Rwanda, you’ll be repaid. Lascelles knows he’ll be repaid. I have a scheme, you see? To move diamonds out of Angola—”

“Yes, yes.” The Frenchman nodded in the way that means, You told me that three times already. “We want you back in Rwanda, Colonel. We want you in the government there. But, we think—Lascelles thinks—in order for us to, mmm, underwrite you again, we need to have, mmm, insurance.”

“Insurance.” Ntarinada, a man at war, didn’t seem to understand the concept of insurance. In fact, he laughed.

“We want to put in a company of real soldiers, Colonel. Oh, I know, I know! Your men are soldiers, yes, yes, they are very good at beating up civilians and fragging people in churches, but frankly, the Tutsis are trained now, and we have intelligence that the Ugandans and the Tanzanians are helping them. So—we need insurance, and you need real soldiers.”

Ntarinada’s face was drawn tight. He licked his lips. “White soldiers, you mean.”

“One company. The best. They’ll go through the Tutsis like a knife, then you come behind. Yes, white. Sorry—it’s the way the world is, Colonel. They have the guns, they have the training, and they have the recent experience. We’ll give you money and guns if you’ll accept one hundred of the best. To ease things a little, Lascelles will send a man you already know to run things. A friend of yours. Okay?”

Ntarinada was furious, but he contained his rage. “Who?”

“Zulu.”

Ntarinada stared. He was surprised. And impressed.

“Zulu,” the Frenchman said again. “The guy who was here two years ago and shot down the—”

Ntarinada held up a hand. “Not even here—don’t say it out loud.” He let his hand fall with a little slap on the table. He pushed his glass about, picked it up and drank off the rest of it and lifted the bottle to pour more. “A lot has happened since Zulu was here.”

“A lot has happened to him. Bosnia. He’s been fighting in Bosnia.”

Ntarinada nodded. He understood perfectly well how a man like Zulu could be fighting in his own country. “Zulu is a good man. Okay. Tell Lascelles I said okay. But get me money and some guns!” He drank. “I keep overall command,” he said.

The Frenchman shook his head. “Sorry. Zulu.”

“Never!”

“Insurance.” The Frenchman smiled. “How about—shared command? You’re both colonels now.”

Ntarinada looked away into the little room’s shadows. He was looking into a century of colonialism, the bitter darkness of working for the whites. “All right,” he said. “I’ll share command with Zulu.” He ran his hand over his thin face, sighed like a man dying of exhaustion. “You bastards.”

Above Tuzla.

The Canadian driver loved the Humvee and couldn’t stop demonstrating it. Alan got the hairiest ride he’d had on dry land since a drunken Italian had taken him on the Amalfi Drive. He found it oddly exhilarating, maybe from having had eight hours of sleep so deep he didn’t even dream. Still, it was nice to know it was a trip he’d have to make only once.

Except that he made it three times—three times up, three times down. And the last time wasn’t until the next afternoon.

The trouble up there wasn’t something that needed a linguist; it needed a good listener. And Alan was a pretty good listener, like anybody who wants to make it in intelligence. The fact that he knew both languages helped, sure; to the Kenyan doctor in charge of the medical unit, there was a plus in hearing a non-African say that it was baridi, baridi kabisa—bloody cold, man. And Alan had been in Kenya and could at least talk as much as a traveler can about the coast and Nairobi and problems up on the Sudanese border. So he learned that the real trouble between the Italian soldiers and the Kenyan medics was not that the Italians were racists or the Kenyans were bad nurses, but that they had all been there too long and none of them felt he had done shit to help the peace and now they were being pulled out and replaced by NATO. To make it worse, the unarmed Kenyan medics felt isolated by language and color and abandoned by the very people who were supposed to protect them, and they took it out in gallows-humor jokes, and some of the jokes were about how the Italians had got their asses whipped twice in Ethiopia—once by the Ethiopians and once by the Brits and the Kenyans.

For Sale: Like-new Italian rifle. Only dropped once.

The jokes had gone stale, then bad; there had been shouting—and, the doctor admitted, a bad fight, a punch that had emptied the benches and become a brawl. Bad.

So Alan got several of the officers from both units together and badgered them into eating their MREs in the same tent—it was lunch, and partway through one of the Italians produced some wine—and, when a shouting match broke out, he got the doctor to calm down enough to snarl that they, the Kenyans, were catching hell from the Serbs, who were just over the newly drawn border two miles away, and the Italians were doing nothing to stop it.

“We can’t do anything to stop it, you cretin!” the Italian screamed. Alan translated this as “We do everything we can, sir.” The Kenyan hollered, “You were afraid in 1942 and you’re afraid now!” which Alan didn’t translate at all. Another Kenyan, a senior surgeon named wa Danio, shook a finger at the Italians and told them that it was the civilians, the civilians over there, they were being tortured, maimed, massacred, and the Italians were doing nothing. The senior Italian, Captain Gagliano, threw up his hands and said, “Nothing, nothing—there is nothing we can do! Anyway, we are leaving.” After lunch, Doctor wa Danio insisted that Alan come with him to the ward, where he showed him an old man who had had his feet cut off with an axe and who had crawled the three miles to the Kenyan unit.

“You know, Lieutenant, we Africans are supposed to be uncivilized, but this is a horror. This is not stupid men swinging pangas; this is deliberate, organized hell. The Italians think we are savages, but we know those bastards over there are monsters!” He showed Alan a woman who had been gang-raped and beaten. A child with one hand, the other lost when he had tried to keep his already wounded father from being beheaded. Alan had a child. He felt sick, then thought what it would be like to sit here week after week, helpless to stop it …

So Alan went down the mountain. On the way down, he figured how it could be done. A warning bell rang in his head but he turned it off, paid no attention, and instead he listened to an inner voice that said, Okay, Suter, you want liaison and intelligence support and acquisition. I’ll give it to you, right up the nose.

He told Murch that the problem up there was not language or jokes or nationalities, it was frustration, fighting men and medical personnel who were frustrated and angry and unappreciated. They wanted to go in and make one hit on the Bosnian Serbs who were committing the atrocities before they were pulled out.

“We can’t go in there,” Murch said. “We’re protectors. Not aggressors.” Murch’s mouth seemed to lose some of its muscle: he was afraid.

“They say there was US armor up there a week ago and it got turned back.”

“Mm, yeah, all the women and kids in a Serb village blocked the road, lay down in front of a tank—they’re fanatical up there. Leave it.”

“Going in to get war criminals would be allowed.”

“I’m not at all sure of that, and we don’t know anything about war criminals over there.”

“The Kenyans say that they know for certain of a house ten miles in that serves as a command center for the butchery. They say it’s used for torture. Everybody knows it, they say.”

“Oh, Christ, Alan, ‘everybody—’” He was afraid of his place, his next evaluation, his career. Fuck him.

“Look, the Italians are good guys and they’re hot to trot. They’ve been sitting up there for two months and their hands have been tied and they’ve had to watch—to watch—while civilians get slaughtered, because of this phony ‘border.’ They want to do something.”

“We all want to do something. Alan, there’s nothing—”

“Yes, there is.” He was feeling pretty good, still. He thought he’d start to sink, but he hadn’t. It was two in the afternoon; he felt really good. Not wired, but charged. “Hit that two-bit torture center in Pustarla.”

“We can’t do that! Al, look, you’re exhausted, you’re not thinking clearly—”

“If we have intelligence that the house is a center for war crimes, we can go in and hit it. In and out.”

“I don’t have the authority.” Murch’s face got stiff. “Canada prides herself on not involving UNPROFOR ground forces.” His voice became pleading. “We’re out of here! IFOR has the responsibility now!”

“UNPROFOR hit Udbina and took out the airfield! UNPROFOR used artillery in Sarajevo! What the fuck, you’re making noise about a goddam hit on one house?”

“Udbina was part of Deny Flight. Alan, please! Go see IFOR.”

They both knew that was bullshit. IFOR command was back in Sarajevo, and they’d say it was an UNPROFOR problem, because weren’t the Italians and the Kenyans the remnant of UNPROFOR? “The Italians are fed up. Their colonel might say no, but he’s taking a few days R and R in Dubrovnik. A company-level hit, that’s all they want. We’d need choppers; I think two would do it.” He was thinking of his own experience, of being pulled out of a firefight by two marine helos. Of course, these guys wouldn’t be US marines. And Alan wouldn’t have his wife in command of the choppers this time. “Who’s got big choppers? You guys have two brand-new Griffons. No? I’ll check the order of battle.”

“Alan—we don’t have the intelligence!”

Alan stared at him, saw a man who wasn’t fed up with bullshit yet, maybe wanted to dedicate his life to bullshit. Why had he thought he liked this guy? He went to the outer office and got the package of photos he’d brought in that morning—all photos that had already passed through his hands once—and pulled a couple and went back to Murch, got a grease pencil, and began to make small circles.

“What the hell is that?”

“This is intelligence.”

Murch leaned in close. “Fuck, man—”

“I could do better with a stereo magnifier.”

Murch provided one. In fifteen minutes, Alan had marked the house that they said was a torture center, five “suspected grave sites,” an outbuilding that the Kenyans’ patients told them was a torture chamber. “Crematorium,” he said, circling something with a chimney.

“Aw, shit—!”

“You been there?”

“No, but—”

“It’s as good as the crap the CIA gives the President.” He handed the photos to Murch. “Copies to whoever has to okay the choppers, plus the Italians, plus me, plus the chopper crews; give us blowups of the house and surroundings. You got a problem?”

Murch shook his head. “Man, you’re something else.” He looked as if he might cry.

“You asked for me.” He was checking the order of battle. “The French have five Pumas; they’re pretty ballsy—they picked those SAS guys out of Gorazde.”

It turned out that Murch wasn’t such a bad guy, after all: he said, “Don’t ask the French.” Alan stared at him. The French had been part of UNPROFOR, were now in IFOR, but a different sector. What was wrong? Murch dropped his voice to almost a whisper. “Just don’t ask the French right now, okay?” The two intel officers looked at each other.

Problem—he means there’s a problem. Leak?

“Gotcha.”

While he was getting his materials together, Murch bent over the aerial photos. When Alan was ready to leave, Murch handed him one with grease-penciled circles. “There’s two armored cars by a building down the road—has to be the police station. One’s in the snow, no tracks around it, so I think it’s down. Probably parts; the embargo’s hurting them bad.” Murch tapped the photo and Alan put it down and looked at it with the magnifier. “I think it’s an AML, maybe French-made, but they’ve licensed countries all over the place. Old, but one of them’s operational—look at all the tracks.” Alan grunted. “Scout car configuration,” Murch went on. “Just machine guns, no cannon—see the shadow?” Alan punched Murch on the shoulder. “We’ll need a couple of shooters. Good catch.” Murch, he decided, was a really okay guy. Just a little—let’s use a polite word—cautious.

He went back up the mountain. The nineteen-year-old driver was beside himself. The gunner, hanging on the back, was not so delighted; he didn’t even get to fire his weapon. Up on the mountain, the Italians were skeptical and the Kenyans wary, but Alan explained how it could be done and asked them to say yes. Two squads plus medics. “Plus me,” the Kenyan surgeon said.

“And you?” the hawk-faced Italian captain said to Alan. It was a challenge. These guys were ready to dislike anybody.

“You want me?”

“I want you to believe in your intelligence. Enough to go along, I mean.”

What had Suter said? He was going to keep Alan away from anything that even smelled like glory? He grinned. “Count me in. As an observer, of course.” He didn’t say that he might be risking a court-martial.

The Kenyans and the Italians looked at each other.

“When?”

Alan thought about his own orders, about how long it would take Suter to figure something out. “Soon,” he said.

The Italian officer murmured, “If I give my colonel time to hear about it before we do it, well—”

The Kenyan surgeon said, “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow dawn,” Alan said.

The three of them looked at each other. They shook hands. He turned the problem of the helos over to the Italian captain and went back to the Kenyan hospital and spent time interviewing the civilians, getting as much hard data as he could on the house in Pustarla. Murch would be putting together a route, he hoped; he should have the latest data on Serb positions and air defenses. Alan’s belief from shipboard intel was that there was no air defense, but out in the Med he hadn’t paid a lot of attention to this hate-filled line where Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs were supposed to divide themselves, and people who happened to be in the minority on either side were being terrorized.

Then he went down the mountain again and used Murch’s computer to write a report on suspected war crimes and criminals in the Bosnian-Serb Pustarla region, pulling in this and that from Intelnet, creating a nice little package of the kind that admirals liked to be briefed from—maps, pretty pictures, juicy quotes from victims. Murch had marked out a route and made a real briefing packet he could use with the troops. He was liking Murch again.

“You got a journalist in your pocket?” he asked Murch.

“Are you wacko? Jesus, Craik—!”

“Wassamattayou? You never heard of PR? Nothing covers your ass like a news report, Murch.”

“Suppose this bombs out?”

Alan had thought about that. “If you’ve got a journalist in your pocket, it’ll come out as a victory no matter what. I’ll get some color photos for him, give him the story, exclusive. He’ll kiss my ass if I ask him to. Yes or no?”

“My boss—”

“Fuck your boss! Yes or no? If the story is out quick, nobody will dare bitch. ‘Brave UNPROFOR Forces Score One for Humanity!’ Come on!”

Murch rubbed his jaw. “There’s a Brit named Gibb, he’s okay, he—”

“Tell him to be at my Humvee in ten minutes. He can watch the prep and he can be there when it’s over, first to interview the brave troops and all that crap. He cannot go along. I’m outa here.”

Then he went back up the mountain, the journalist Gibb laughing nervously as the Humvee spun mud and gravel into the black gulf at the edge of the road. Gibb was on something, might have been a better companion if he hadn’t been, but Alan suspected the man was strung out like everybody else, thought he needed help—whatever gets you through the night. Alan left him in the Kenyans’ civilian ward. He spent half an hour with the hawk-faced captain and the Kenyan surgeon and a cluster of men in battle dress, planning. It was going to be kept simple, except nothing involving death is ever simple. The captain was unhappy about the armored vehicle but didn’t want to use anti-tank rockets—they had old Canadian Hellers—which he thought might go right through the meager armor without exploding. He was taking bullet-trap grenade launchers with HEAT, instead. Alan frowned when he heard but muttered, “Well, it’s your call.” Except that he would be there, too.

Two Ukrainian Mi-26s “diverted” from Zagreb would come in at 0300, and Alan would brief their crews. Off at 0445. Seven hours from now.

He slept.

When he woke, he reached for Rose and murmured her name. His hand felt the grit of the floor and he remembered where he was, a cot in the company office. Through the door, he could see men in flight suits and hear their talk, all charged up. The chopper crews. He had slept right through their arrival. Sitting up, he felt how tired he really was, and he thought, This isn’t a good idea. I’m wiped. But it was too late.

He put his wallet and his tags in his pack, checked himself for anything that would show he was American. His watch. His wedding ring; it came off hard, and he sucked the knuckle and got it off with the spit. Reluctantly, he put the Browning in the bag; he wanted to carry it, but it had been his father’s and had personal engraving on it. Even his skivvies, which had a label. Then he dressed from the skin out in stuff the Italians had given him. No rank marks. This is really stupid, he thought. He pushed the pack toward the Italian captain. “If something happens—I’m anonymous. My people will figure it out.” He wrote a couple of lines to Rose and stuffed the paper in the pack and pushed away the thought of what she would say if she could see him. Then he was on.

“It’s a short trip, gentlemen—ten miles in, ten out. I figure six minutes’ flying time each way, including diversion. The target is a house in a village called Pustarla, just one street and a few houses around it. Problem: there’s deep snow everywhere. Roads around the place took a week to get plowed, then some of it was done with horses—we got aerial photos. Only two sure places to put down a chopper, the town soccer field, which I’ve marked Bravo, and this smaller place marked Alpha, which is cleared—for a helo, we think, but the helo wasn’t there yesterday. We believe no land mines. It’s a hundred meters from the target; the soccer field is close to four hundred. The village street is a mess—ruts, ice, high banks. The police station is three hundred meters farther along; there should be ten to twelve guys there, well armed, capable. Respect them! They’ve got two armored cars, one probably inoperable because it hasn’t been dug out of the snow.

“We’re going in to Alpha as our primary landing zone; Bravo is backup and will be where the helos go if there’s trouble while the troops are at the target. That would leave us four hundred meters to cover on foot to get out.” He didn’t like that part. Four hundred meters could be a long way in snow.

“If the Yugoslavs scramble aircraft, they’re only fourteen minutes away. However, if they do that they’re going to get pasted.” Deny Flight was still on under a different name, the pilots impatient because nothing much was happening in deep winter. The F-16s and F-18s, Jaguars, Hornets, Tornados, and Fighting Falcons of several countries would love it if the Serbs scrambled so much as a flying chicken.

The Ukrainian choppers had come with crews and their own ground defense, two tough guys each with squad weapons. Alan made sure there would be room for prisoners and material coming back, double-checked with the Kenyans and the Italian ground troops. It would be tight: the Kenyans had insisted on sending two medics per helo; they wanted in on the action. The Italians were sending twenty altogether, two teams they had decided to call Romulus and Remus. Oh, shit, why not? Gagliano had told him that the Dutch had a mortar unit up the hill that was itching to put stuff over the border if the militia there made a move; the Canadians would have two electronics surveillance F-16s in the air, with the new US Air Force operation at Tuzla on alert. Certain shrugs, looks, and evasions suggested that the operation had been put together the way crucial spare parts were sometimes got—what was called “moonlight acquisition.”

“Captain Gagliano will brief you on the operation itself. I want to remind everybody—everybody—of what we’re after: intelligence. One, prisoners; two, electronics—computer stuff, direct links, comm, anything; three, records, including photos. We’re going to go in, grab what we can, and get out. If we have to shoot up somebody who happens to be a war criminal—” He looked around. “Sending messages is part of intelligence, too. I don’t object to sending a message.” Somebody guffawed.

Translations were going on all over the tent. The Kenyans and Italians had already got together with the Ukrainians, and they’d cobbled up some kind of signal system, with somebody who could speak English on each team. Still, it would be hairy, he thought. Speed, they had to emphasize speed. Surprise and speed, and baling wire and spit.

The big helos pounded south from the takeoff, seeming for three minutes to be heading back toward Srebnik, as if they might be taking hospital cases out. Then they cut sharply east, then east and north, two hundred feet off the deck. It was still dark, but the first light made the eastern horizon visible. The chopper interior smelled of metal and hot oil and sweat. Somebody passed gas, not helping matters at all.

“Four minutes.”

The word went along the helo, quattro minuti, quattro minuti.

Alan was in the second helo with the Kenyan surgeon and the hit team, Remus. Gagliano was in the lead aircraft with the Romulus team, which would protect against the police. They had two shooters with shoulder-fired antitank weapons, at least one guy with a rotating rocket grenade launcher. If things went right, Romulus would already be on the street when Alan’s helo touched down.

Thirty seconds on the street, he thought, forty-five max if the ruts are bad. How long did it really take you to trot a hundred meters in full battle gear? He shifted uneasily. The Italian body armor felt strange; so did the helmet. NATO gear, but not quite right, somehow. He was too thin for the body armor. He had a 9mm Beretta in a holster, a weapon he’d never liked as well as the Browning. Different safety, different trigger pull. If he had to use it, it would be in close, fast. Not good with an unfamiliar gun. What was he doing here, anyway?

“One minute.” Uno minuto, uno minuto …

He would be among the last out, only the Kenyans behind him, then the Ukrainian rangers who would stay with the chopper. He put his hand on the buckle, ready to unstrap. Where were his gloves? On his hands, of course. It was cold out there. Strange weapon, gloves, Christ—

“Thirty seconds.” Trenta secondi—

“Avanti!”

He watched the Italians bail out; they emptied the chopper like apples coming out of a basket. Alan jumped into the dark after them and hit the snow running, staggered, felt somebody hit him from behind, and he was up and following the dark line of figures ahead of him. They weren’t trotting, they were sprinting, or so it seemed. Somebody passed him, too eager. He whispered, “No—” It must be the Kenyan medics. “Polepole, polepole—” But they surged ahead of him. Only Doctor wa Danio back there now, floundering a little in the snow.

They came out into the village street. It felt like a tunnel, the snowpiles high on each side, thrown up there with shovels, tree limbs overhead like fingers, then charcoal sky. It was lighter in the east, noticeably so now. Faint lights showed in a few of the houses, maybe not even electric, but they were mostly blocked by the snowbanks. He slipped in a frozen rut and almost went down; ahead of him, the Italians were sliding, lurching. His feet made loud crunching noises, like the other feet, all out of step as he’d briefed them so there would be no pounding rhythm. Otherwise, it was silent. Not a tunnel but a tomb. A tomb with running men, running figures that would have been dark shadows moving through their town if anybody had seen them. Ghosts in NVGs.

A cow was walking down the other side of the road. Its breath came out in steamy puffs. Suddenly, it frisked to the side, stood splay-legged, staring at them. It jumped again, then tried to run back up the street, sliding.

He was hyperventilating now. Only a hundred meters, and he was puffing as if he was running the mile. Too fast, too fast, he thought. He didn’t dare look at his watch, fearful he might fall. Then he was at the driveway that ran up to the house, which had been somebody’s pride once, a sign of some kind of wealth in this pitiful place. The house stood back among some scruffy trees that were only big enough to make a chopper landing there impossible; it had a low wall around it, the remains of gate pillars, all visible on the aerial photography. Gagliano’s team were already spread along the cover of the wall, the two shooters out where they could get at the armored car if it came.

He turned into the drive. No lights showed in the house. They still had surprise. They had wanted to cut off the house’s communications, but it had a spindly radio tower on the roof and there was no getting at it easily. They were just going to go in, and the hell with it. Somebody up there had plastique, if they needed it.

As Alan got close, he saw the crouching figures, weapons ready, and two more, only shapes to him, near the house, moving nearer. Several had already put up their night-vision goggles. The two closest to the house would be the sergeant and his partner, he thought. They were to try the door, place the plastique if they had to. If they could go in, they would, stun grenades ready; four more men behind them. The hope was to invade the house before any defense could be laid on. That was the hope.

Alan flopped into the snow facing the door. The Beretta was in his hand. When had he done that? He held his breath. What were they doing up there? The sergeant and his partner had disappeared into a little portico, like something on a cuckoo clock, with a little peaked roof. Alan could see nothing, then made out one of them bent over or kneeling. What the hell was he doing, looking through the keyhole?

The man stood up. “Aperto,” he whispered. Open. Jesus, the front door was open. Just like a small town anywhere.

The four men got up, ready to go, and there was movement in the portico and suddenly it looked different, blacker, the door open, and the silent figures rushed forward. He wanted to go in. He looked at his watch, couldn’t find it because of the heavy glove. The hell with it. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Surely not. Yet—

A shot boomed from the house. Everybody on the snow tensed; you could hear nylon rustle, a piece of ice crumble. Then hell broke loose, brief hell, loud hell: shots in quick succession, too many to count, and the thud of a stun grenade, the flash in an upstairs window as well as the doorway. A voice. Then somebody screaming, the words not Italian, not one of his. Then he was up and running for the door, and somebody was reaching back for him, hand on his arm, “Tenente, subito, subito—” Quick, quick.

“Lights!” he bellowed in Italian. Speed was more important now than invisibility. A flashlight bounced off painted walls, some godawful blue; then a light came on in a corridor beyond, and he was being waved in. Overhead, feet pounded and doors banged, and automatic fire started somewhere outside, maybe the outbuilding in back, somebody hosing. The screamer dropped to a lower key and gurgled, and the Kenyan medics were already inside and headed up a stairway to Alan’s left. He shoved ahead, was aware of more shots outside, prayed it wasn’t the armored car already but the other building, the torture place. Ahead were bare rooms, what had been some sort of dining room, now an office. He saw two wooden desks, several chairs; a bare overhead bulb threw a sickly light, hardly more than a wash of yellow-gray.

“Get the computer!” he shouted. One of the Italians started to wrestle with the monitor, and Alan pushed the man’s hands away, tore out the cords and gave him the computer itself. He didn’t know the words for keyboard or monitor. “Only this!” he shouted. The man passed it to somebody else. Alan raced around the room, opening drawers, dumping files. There was a fax machine. Could they take it? Would there be anything worth saving on it? No, he decided, too bulky, must have been the first one ever made, huge. He shoved papers into a pile with his feet, and somebody began to stuff them into a pack. He added notebooks, a weird kind of rolodex, a card file. Then he stood in the middle of the room, for just an instant paralyzed, unable to think. Too much stuff, no way to sort it out. Couldn’t read it, didn’t know the language—what the hell—

“Tenente?”

The sergeant was framed by an archway, dark wood with things like spools sticking down all the way around. He had a civilian, hands held behind (plastic cuffs; they’d begged them from the MPs). The man was in pajamas, barefoot. Alan made a savage gesture. “Take him!”

“All of them?”

“How many?”

“Three. Sleeping upstairs. One is—” He made a gesture.

“Take them, take them—they can help carry this shit. What’s upstairs?”

“Bedrooms. Nothing.”

Alan grabbed a flashlight and sprinted up. The stairs went like a square corkscrew, up-turn, up-turn, up-turn. There were heavy doors everywhere, all open. The grenade had left burn marks and the place stank, and smoke drifted in the flashlight beam with dust. He went along, shining the light into each room, the Beretta ready but feeling awkward and too big, sliding the light around the door and then looking. The sergeant had been right; there seemed to be nothing. Graffiti, old magazines, a girl’s photo, clothes. Not military, these people. He had done five of the rooms when he flashed the light in one and something pinged and he swept the light back, not knowing what it had been, a shape or a sign, what? And the light showed another anonymous room, this one seeming unused, even austere. But something—

An ashtray. He went in and shone the light down into it. Big, plastic, empty. Wiped clean. Around the edge, “Chicago Bears Football.”

Small world. That’s what had caught him, something out of place that had put little hooks into his consciousness, like burrs catching a sweater. Chicago Bears Football. Here?

He picked it up with the hand that held the Beretta and with the other swept the light over the walls. Nothing. Yes, something. A color photograph, held to the old wallpaper with transparent tape. He went close and looked at it. Was it anything? A man in camos with an assault rifle raised above his head, standing over what Alan was pretty sure was a corpse. Something written on the too-blue sky with a felt pen, Cyrillic and unreadable. Alan peeled it from the wall and started to stuff it into his jacket, and he saw color on the back as well, another photo, female and nude and—

He saw the movement before he heard the man, and he ducked and swung the light and glimpsed a broad, dark face, contorted by the flinch that meant he was in the act of firing. Alan had time to think that the man was half-dressed and therefore cold, somebody who had been in the house and had managed to hide, and he kept the light moving, meaning to blind the man but in fact giving him something to shoot at. Better for the man if he had been an inexperienced shooter, but he wasn’t; he knew enough to aim, and habit makes you aim at what you can see. He had a nine-millimeter CZ that sounded louder than the grenade and made a flash that blinded them both. Alan shot on instinct, on terror, not sure he hadn’t yelped. He was slow because of the strange pistol, wrong size, too heavy goddamit take forever to point! But the man was only five feet away. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Four sounds running into two like more grenades, flashes of fire, blood and bone on the wall, the smell of copper and gunfire. Alan reacted away, stepping to the side, moving the light away so he wouldn’t be a target; he knew the other man was down, and his ears were dead to sound from the shots, his eyes dazzled, but he knew he had heard something, seen something else out there—a second man?

His heart was thudding. He raised the Beretta again, and suddenly the corridor was bathed in light, astonishingly bright and white to his dark-accustomed eyes. One of the helos had put on its searchlight. Why now? he had time to think, realizing that the light must be moving over the house but registering at the same time a shadow on the corridor wall, then knowing that the light was coming through a window of the room beyond and catching another figure, because what Alan saw was like a hand clutching at the back of his neck. The shadow not human, distorted by the angle, but there was something wrong with it, anyway; impressions cascaded down his consciousness: kid’s game, the shadows you make with your fingers on the wall, a rabbit, an owl, but this one something bad; then witch, Halloween mask and he couldn’t figure it out, something primitive whispered evil and then the shadow was moving and the light was swinging away, getting watery and fading, and Alan moved to reach the doorway at the side, to put only his hand and an eye out where the bullets would come.

He doused the light and stepped forward, swaying, his balance suddenly all wrong, crashed against the side of the doorway and saw movement. He ducked low and fired, knowing he’d miss because he couldn’t see. Flash and roar and then an answering flash from the corridor, something smaller (a .32 or some goddam thing like a Makorov), and he was trying to get the light on again, his hand suddenly slippery, rotating the flashlight to try to find the rubber button, and it came on, and he saw a face, a large, ferocious face, fired, and it was gone. Down low now, he brought the Beretta around and squeezed, and a window exploded outward as somebody jumped through it.

Alan straightened up. Something was very wrong with his left side. He slipped, knowing he’d slipped in the blood of the downed man, tried to run along the corridor and got to the smashed window bent over and leaning against the wall. Thinking, What kind of maniac goes through a window, taking out the frame and cutting the shit out of himself—? and flashing the light down and getting an immediate gunshot flash from below. He doused the light. His eyes were still dazzled. Below and thirty feet away, somebody was leaping over the snow, and Alan had time only to see that the man was naked and barefoot before the figure disappeared behind the old smokehouse that Alan had labeled “possible crematorium” on the aerial photo. He fired two double-taps and shouted for the sergeant.

Where the hell was everybody? He started back down the corridor, bellowing for the sergeant, and almost fell over the man he’d shot, and he thought The nose, there was something wrong with the nose in the shadow, that’s why I thought it was a witch.

Alan shone the light on the downed man. His own hand was shaking; he could feel sweat on his ribs, jelly in his knees. And pain in his left side. The fucker had hit him, maybe got off a second shot. The body armor had saved him, but he had a hell of a pain.

The man was on his back. Bubbles of blood were coming up. His eyes were open, and Alan felt that the eyes were staring at him, right through the glare of the flashlight.

“Medic!” he shouted.

“Tenente! You okay?” The sergeant was at the far end of the corridor, assault rifle at the ready.

“Somebody went out the window! Get after him! Now!”

The sergeant shouted, and Alan could feel more than hear feet pounding downstairs.

“I’ve got a man down,” Alan said, shining the light downward.

“One of ours?”

“Theirs.”

“Leave him!”

Shit. Alan inhaled sharply, realizing he’d been holding his breath; the sound shuddered in his chest. He kicked the man’s gun down the corridor and swung the light off him, as if not seeing him made it better.

They had the downstairs almost cleaned out, what little they could take. The sergeant had taken charge, using some system of his own to determine what to take, what to leave. Probably weight. Alan checked his watch. Nine minutes since touchdown. Christ, it seemed like all night.

“You all right, Tenente?”

“You guys missed two of them up there.”

“They’re after the one in the snow, but I told them, no pursuit.” The sergeant was a hard nut. He was more concerned about his men than about Alan’s lost war criminal. Good for him.

“The guy’s naked—in the snow!”

The sergeant nodded as if he had known that all along. “They want you in back,” he said. “Then we go.” He was old for a soldier, probably ready to retire; he wasn’t taking any shit from an American intel officer. A Navy intel officer at that, for Christ’s sake.

The other building had been a cow barn. A few of the stanchions were still there in a row down the left side. The walls were stone, laid up without concrete, the floor, a couple of feet below ground level, mostly dirt with a cracked concrete apron at the front end. Three bodies were laid out on the concrete now, all civilians. There seemed to be far too much blood for only three men, but three was all he could see. There was an under-smell of old cow, on top of that fresh blood, and then shit.

“They tried to shoot it out. One was awake somehow; one of our guys took a hit, he’s not bad. We took out two people. Not in very good shape.” The soldier looked sideways at him. “Really messed up.”

“Torture?”

The soldier nodded. Alan walked down the room, smelled vomit. He already felt sick, was still hyperventilating. There was old blood on the walls down here, probably a lot more soaked into the dirt floor. The stanchions had been used as human restraints, with handcuffs locked to them high and low. At the end of the room was a single chair by itself, almost centered. It looked like a set for a minimalist play. Against the wall was a big washtub, half full of reddened water, a lot of water splashed out on the floor. Ropes and a steel bar, once some sort of tool, hung from the ceiling beam.

“The airplane,” he said. A form of torture.

“They’d cut the eyelids off one guy, then shot him. The doctor doesn’t think he’ll make it.”

Alan got out the point-and-shoot camera and pointed and shot. He felt he was going to throw up. Partly it was almost getting killed, partly it was what he was doing, seeing. And the pain in his side. His hands were shaking so hard he had trouble pointing the camera.

“Tenente! Time to go!”

He ran back to the house and took three photos of the interior. Maybe the newsman could do something with them. He didn’t go back upstairs.

Something boomed. He doused his flashlight and started out the front door. The sergeant grabbed his arm, pulled him down. “Police armored car. They’re coming up the street.”

Alan looked around. It was almost light. There was the sergeant, three soldiers. Him. Flames turned the snow pink, the torture barn on fire.

“Everybody else out?”

The sergeant nodded.

“Go?”

The sergeant pointed, got up. They ran for the gate. One man stayed behind, threw something in the door—thud— and the place went up in flames.

A big double boom sounded from the street, probably both shooters at once; flame snicked up through the tree branches like a tongue, then seemed to expand at the bottom, beyond the wall. He was aware of more general firing, faraway pop-pops and louder, more deliberate noise nearby. At the gate, the sergeant thrust out an arm like a traffic cop and held him back, looked, then grabbed him and pushed him in the direction of the choppers. Alan resented it, resented the rough handling and the implication that he didn’t belong there, but he knew the sergeant was right. Anyway, bullets were whiffling near him. He got down. Captain Gagliano and half his Romulus team were trading fire with somebody down the street—quite a way down the street, well beyond the burning armored car. The other way, the rest of Romulus waited to cover the withdrawal. On the other side of the street, several bodies lay in the snow. Serb militia, from the town. One man was in striped pajamas. The sergeant waved an impatient hand at him and Alan began to run. The waiting soldiers got bigger, bigger, and then they, too, were passing him backward through their line, as if he was not quite their main concern just then and they just wanted to make sure he was out of the line of fire …

He hunched his shoulders and ran for the helos.

The temperature in the big tent must have been close to eighty Fahrenheit despite the cold outside. It wasn’t the big propane heater but the press of bodies. Italians, Ukrainians, Kenyans, one American—even a couple of Dutch artillerists who had wandered down, although they hadn’t had provocation enough to fire a shot. It was as noisy as a locker room after a winning game, and just about as smelly, although the over-riding smell was red wine, with some Kenyan cane splashed around the edges.

Feeling no pain, Alan thought. He certainly knew what that meant now. The surgeon had given him two capsules, would have given him four or maybe eight if he’d asked, and on top of that there was the wine. It wasn’t what used to be called Dago Red, either, but Gattinara from a year long enough ago that the stuff didn’t show up in shops any more. Courtesy of Captain Gagliano’s colonel, who was shocked, shocked! to hear of what had happened (you had to be reminded of Claude Rains in Casablanca) but was so delighted he’d released a couple of cases from his own store. Flown in specially as soon as the message flashed that they were out with only three hit, no dead, and two helos full of goodies.

“Well, not exactly goodies,” Alan was explaining slowly to Doctor wa Danio. He spoke with the exaggerated care of a man who has had too much wine, just enough painkiller, and not enough sleep. “We seem to have brought out two oversize sacks of Serb garbage.” He leaned closer. “I am not speaking met-a-phor-i-cally. I mean actual garbage. Rinds and things.” Along with some more useful stuff like names and addresses and computer disks.

Two Ukrainians were doing some sort of dance to music that sounded to Alan like Afro-pop, but he suspected that everything sounded like Afro-pop to him just then. He smiled at the Ukrainians. When he turned back to the Kenyan doctor to tell him how much the Ukrainians amused him, the doctor had been replaced by Captain Gagliano. Gagliano had a glass in one hand and Alan’s neck in the other. “Did we biff them?” he said.

“We biffed them.”

“We biffed them!” Gagliano nodded. “I hear you were hit.”

“In the ribs.”

“Nothing.”

“They are my ribs.”

“Ribs are nothing. I have one man shot in the neck. The neck is something. One in the arm. He may lose the arm. But your rib does not impress me.” He kissed Alan’s cheek. “What impresses me is you got us in and out and we biffed them.” He leaned his head back and tried to focus. “You want an Italian medal?”

“You can’t have too many medals.”

The captain nodded. “Or too much wine. You want some wine?”

“I think—”

Then he was sitting on the floor and somebody was smiling at him, God knows why. He tried to get up, thought better of it, and sat there, grinning at the noise and the heat and the uproar. The combination allowed him to remember that he had killed a man, this time without feeling sick about it. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Bubbles of blood.

“Lieutenant?”

He looked up. Way up. A very tall, emaciated man in civilian clothes. The man folded himself into pieces and brought his head down to Alan’s level and said, “You look for me, they say.” He had a bony, almost skull-like face, and skin cratered by illness or acne long ago. “I am Marco. Translator?”

“Ah.” Right. That made sense. But why? Aha. Translator, yes. Alan held up a finger. “Momento,” he said, forgetting that Italian was not the language in question. Where had he put it? He patted himself, finally found it in the buttoned breast pocket of the Italian shirt he was wearing. Took it out with great care and unfolded it, presenting it to Marco so that the slightly frivolous backside, showing incomplete but naked female parts, was hidden. It was the picture of the man in camos he’d taken from the bedroom in the house. “What’s that say?” he asked. At least that was what he hoped he asked.

Marco squinted. “Says, ‘Colonel Zulu at the Battle of the Crows.’”

“What’s that mean? ‘Battle of the Crows’?”

Marco scratched his ruined chin. “Aaah. Well. It’s the Serbs, you see? The Battle of the Crows—hmm. Well.” He sighed. “It happened six centuries ago, okay?”

That was not okay at all. That made no sense. What was this guy, drunk or something?

Detroit.

Radko Panic dropped his heavy coat on the floor, not even thinking, knowing she would hang it up later, if she knew what was good for her, and glanced out of habit at the crappy little table where she put the mail. Bills, junk, ripoffs, he expected, the same as always, but there was a package and his heart jumped. Even the fact that it was different was enough, but there was the color of it, too, and the feel of the paper under his fingers and the string that held it together. The old days. That rough brown paper, that hairy string—relics, he knew now, of a technology he had left behind when he had left the old places. The postmark was French, but he knew it did not come from France.

She had left his meal for him and he shoved it into the microwave and pushed buttons without thinking, his face split by a big grin. Rare, that grin. Really rare. He saw himself in the microwave window. He’d had a couple on the way home at the Rouge Tap; the grin, pasted on the microwave as if it belonged to the machine and not to him, was happy. Well, why not? A man deserved to be happy.

He took one of her knives and cut the string. He had surprisingly delicate hands for a big man, but he was a precision toolmaker, did things well, deftly, when he was sober. He slit the tape-shiny ends and slid out the box inside, made of a thin cardboard of the kind that used to come inside shirts. It too was held with tape, and he cut that and put her knife aside, thinking without thinking that the knife was getting dull and what the hell had she been doing with it, sharpening pencils again?

Inside was a photograph and something else. He slid the photo out. He left the something else, like the prize in a Crackerjack box. There had still been Crackerjack boxes when he had first come to America. He had loved them.

The photo, grainy and a little washed-out, showed a man in camo fatigues, one hand raised over his head, an automatic rifle in the raised hand. It was too fuzzy to see what kind of rifle it was. At the man’s feet was something dark, a bundle, a pile, a—what?

He turned the photo over. Big, black letters said, “YOUR BOY AT THE BATTLE OF THE CROWS!!!!”

She came in behind him then; he heard her, didn’t even turn, didn’t speak. He grinned at the back of the photo. He had heard the expression “bursting with pride,” knew now what it meant. He thought he was going to explode with it.

The microwave dinged and she said something and he grunted at her, and she got the food out and began to arrange it at the place she had already set for him. Her hair in some kind of thing, an old bathrobe clutched around her, her face gray, soft, lined, purple shadows under the eyes.

“Is it—from—?” She had had a sweet voice as a young woman; now it was wispy. She was afraid of him. With good reason.

He thrust the photo at her. He sat down and picked up the fork and filled his mouth. Seeing her standing close by, he waved her away and she went over to the sink and held the photo up under the light.

He thrust another forkful into his mouth and then put a long finger down into the narrow box and took out the small thing that was in there. It made him grin again. It was a human eyelid.

2

February – April

The succession of naval fleets that guard the Mediterranean is like the turning of a great wheel. Always, at the top, is the fleet in place—one nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, most potent of the weapons in the world, on which the commanding admiral flies his flag; two guided-missile cruisers; destroyers and frigates and submarines; and, around and behind them, support and repair and fueling ships. These ships are six months on station—six months at the top of the wheel—with tenuous lines of communication to the land, to be sure, but alone at sea as ships have always been alone at sea. Then the wheel turns, and the battle group on station turns its bows and heads for the Pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar, and at the same time the fleet that has been forming and training on the east coast of the United States puts to sea and begins its voyage to the top of the wheel. The wheel turns, and the new fleet takes its place on station, and the old fleet goes into port at Norfolk, while another fleet trains and forms and readies itself to sail in six months more. And behind it, at the bottom of the wheel, another fleet exists as an idea and a skeletal organization; it will not sail for a year, but already its flag-rank commander is in place with his most important senior officers; the air squadrons that will deploy with the carriers are designated; ships and ships’ companies know where they will be. And even as the wheel turns, other fleets exist, phantom or hypothetical fleets, ideas of fleets that will come into being in eighteen months or two years or five or ten. Other crisis areas, or areas of strategic interest, have their own wheels—Korea, for instance, or the Persian Gulf. Sometimes one area has several wheels.

The wheel turns, and forward into time the fleets move toward their place on the wheel and the six-month period for which they exist: the presence of a battle group in the Mediterranean Sea. It is a figure of life—of coming into being and of going; of being born, and of dying; of existing only as an idea of the future and as a memory of the past.

The battle groups come and go. It is the wheel that is important.

Vice-Admiral Richard Pilchard commanded Battle Group Four. Battle Group Four served off Bosnia, drilled holes in the Adriatic, had liberty in Trieste and Naples. They won no glory, but they held the line, and their aircraft sent a message. Now Battle Group Four is split back into its component ships, in Norfolk, Charleston, Mayport, and Newport.

Vice-Admiral Nathan Green commands Battle Group Five, now on station off Bosnia; it changed its name when it arrived on station and became Task Force 155. It has a NATO name, too, but most people will keep calling it Battle Group Five, or BG 5.

Vice-Admiral Richard Toricelli commands Battle Group Six, now training in the Norfolk area. Vice-Admiral Rudolph Newman will command Battle Group Seven and is organizing his staff. Vice-Admiral Harold Rehnquist will command Battle Group Eight but has only just received those orders and will not sail for almost eighteen months.

Alan Craik is the Assistant Carrier Air Wing Intelligence Officer for BG 5, which is at the top of the wheel. On station. If not facing the animal, then at least very sensitive to its presence.

LCDR “Rafe” Rafehausen, now finishing a stint at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, will soon report to VS-49 as its executive officer. LTjg Christine Nixon has already reported aboard VS-49 at Cecil Field, Florida, after her first, abbreviated tour working counternarcotics in Key West, Florida, to become its intelligence officer. Seaman Apprentice Henry Sneesen, Aviation Electronics striker, has joined VS-49 direct from his A school and boot camp in Orlando, Florida. VS-49 itself has existed as an entity with airplanes and men and women to repair them, maintain them, fly them, and fight them for only two months, but 49’s place on the wheel has existed for over a year. VS-49 is going to sea as the airborne antisubmarine squadron of an air wing assigned to USS Andrew Jackson in Battle Group Seven, commanded by Admiral Newman. And, like every battle group that the US Navy sends to sea, this one will endure wind and waves, merciless weather, stress, and danger, and not all of its members will return. But, unlike most, Battle Group Seven will have to fight.

Fort Reno, North Carolina.

Harry O’Neill was mad, and he had to piss so bad he could feel his bladder throbbing. He was doing a goddam stupid surveillance exercise, and he was still angry about last night’s exercise, and he wasn’t doing things very well. He hadn’t checked this part of the route for johns when he did the prep, only telephones. Would it be a screwup if he stopped to piss? And what would he do if one of the instructors came into the john with him—maybe spoke to him, even challenged him?

“Shit,” O’Neill muttered. He didn’t say it with any force. Last night still enraged him. He and a student partner had done a mock recruiting exercise, taking two instructors to dinner and pretending to make the first steps toward recruiting, pretending to have a cover and having to use the fake name and the fake ID and the fake profession. And what had been the instructor’s summary of what O’Neill had done? What had the black instructor said about the black student?

“Not credible,” he had said. Why? “Has to learn to dress.” O’Neill felt outraged. He’d worn the clothes he’d been wearing for years! What was it—the Burberry blazer? the Willis and Geiger shirt? the Church shoes? What the fuck did he mean?

Then he had got to the last line of the evaluation and understood—a lot.

“I don’t believe this put-on taste and ‘class’ in a black man.”

Harry O’Neill had seen where his real problem lay.

So he had tried to take out his anger by writing a letter to Alan Craik. He could let Craik, alone among his white friends, see his bitterness. “I been dissed by what I’m sure this bastard would call ‘one of my own people’!” he wrote. “I ain’t NEEGGAH enuf fo him. This NEEGGAH is 2 stylish 4 him! Jesus Christ, Al, haven’t these fuckheads ever seen a gentleman before?”

So now he was driving carefully down a road in Virginia, seething with rage and trying to do well in a surveillance exercise while keeping his bladder from exploding all over the rental car.

He wanted a john so bad he squirmed. He drummed on the steering wheel with his right hand and then jabbed the radio to turn off some sixties soft-rock crap and then jabbed it back on because the silence somehow made his bladder worse. He glanced into the left-side mirror and saw them still back there, the green Camaro with the two guys, nicely on his butt but hanging back. Where was the other one? And which was the other one—the red Saturn he’d seen twice with the dark-haired woman? Or the dark Cherokee with the older guy in the hat? “Shit,” he muttered again.

Ahead was the two-lane road down to the ferry. There would be a line for the ferry, but it went every fifteen minutes, and he could get into line and then hit the head at the ticket office and get relief. Yes! Except that his plan was to take the left before the ferry and force the guys following him to declare themselves, both cars, and then when they had done that he could go one-point-three miles to the little hill with the sharp left on the far side, take the left and get out of sight before they came over the hill so that at least one would go straight. If he was lucky. (Luck is not a planning factor, the instructor had said, but it is useful.) No, they would go straight, because the road turned again and then twisted like a snake for a mile, so they’d think he was up ahead. (That was his alternative, to speed up and stay on the road and use the twists to get out of sight. He might do that. In fact, that had been his original plan. But, goddamit, there wasn’t a phone with a john up there for six-point-two miles, and if he took the left there was one in point-seven!)

He swung left away from the ferry, trying not to feel his bladder as the road got rough, going deliberately slow so they wouldn’t lose him, drawing them along. They must be made to think that losing him was their fault, not his. Then he would make his phone call and leave the message and be out of it.

Phone call first, he told himself. He groaned. He knew that the phone call had to be first. Even if his bladder burst. Duty calls. Ha-ha. Call of nature. Right.

The Camaro was right back there where it should be, and then well behind it he could see another vehicle, dark-colored. Must be the Cherokee. Okay. Well, that was good, at least he knew who they were now.

He was chewing his tongue, a habit he’d got into since he got in this business. He’d never had nerves before. Now he chewed it almost viciously. The little hill was coming up, then the quick left. If the Camaro speeded up—! But it didn’t. It was okay. Distance was good, speed was good—

O’Neill went up the hill exactly right, wanting to gun it but keeping it just the same speed, not giving anything away (Nice job, O’Neill; thank you, sir, but I’d rather be pissing) and then, just over the crest, accelerated and hit the brake a tap as he jerked it left, a quick skid turn, and he was into the side road and swinging back right and out of sight, and he’d done it.

He’d done it! Nobody had followed him!

“Bladder, stick with me now!” he murmured, and he ripped the last seven-tenths to the convenience store he’d spotted three days before. There were two pump islands and a small parking area, and at the side a telephone he’d checked, and it had been working last time he came by. Please, God. He had the phonecard ready. He winced as he got out of the car and his bladder shifted, and he was sure he was walking bent over as he headed for the phone. God, if there was somebody there ahead of him, he’d crack! Some teenager, giggling and—

Nobody.

He was aware of movement behind. He swung his head, alert for one of the pursuers. No, an old guy in a blue Jimmy. Still, he waited, throbbing. Always be suspicious. The old guy got down. Flexed his knee. Bad leg. Come on! The old guy was wearing a tractor hat, which he now took off so he could rumple up his hair. He looked around. Stretched. Come on! Then he took out a lot of keys that were chained to his belt by something you could have docked the QE2 with, and he selected a key with the care of a Baby Boomer selecting a blush wine, and at last he jerked the hose out of its cradle and jammed it down into his tank and began to pump. Whistling.

That was okay, then. O’Neill tried not to think of the gas running into the tank, the sound of liquid.

O’Neill leaned into the phone’s transparent shelter and heard the dial tone. Inserted the phonecard. The call was to another area code; the numbers seemed to go on and on. Then the ringing. Two rings, hang up. Good. Wait. Don’t think about pissing. Listen for the dial tone. Card. Area code. Number. Ringing. One, two, three, four—picked up. No voice.

“Seventeen,” O’Neill said. “Yes.” Oh, thank God! End of exercise.

He hung up, ready to run for the men’s room—and the old guy from the pickup truck was standing there, about five feet from him. The old guy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a card and held it up. The card was black, otherwise blank, but O’Neill knew what it meant.

“Oh, shit.”

“You left skid marks back at the turn,” the old guy said. “C-minus.”

O’Neill sagged. “You going to wash me out of the program?”

“That’s not my decision. I’ll say you did pretty good up to the last part.”

O’Neill started to say something, and then his bladder really pulsed, and he said, “If I don’t get to pee, I’ll wet my pants.”

“Oh, we would flunk you out for that.” The old guy grinned. “Got to learn to carry a bottle, son.” And, as if to prove that he was a mean old sonofabitch, he made a sound: “Pssssssss—”

O’Neill ran.

That evening, he learned that he had made the second cut, despite the low grade on the surveillance exercise. Three others hadn’t—two young civilians who hadn’t a clue and shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and a marine captain whose flunkout was a real surprise. He seemed tough and smart to O’Neill, but he was out and Harry was still in. And Richmond had left on his own hook three days before. The class was shrinking.

Why him and not me? he wondered, thinking of the marine captain. I stay, he goes. Makes no sense. He found he wasn’t entirely pleased that he hadn’t been bounced. Relieved, yes. Ego-relieved. But deeper, no. He wasn’t sure he belonged here.

After the posting of the flunk list, they’d put up for the first time a list of after-graduation assignments. The better you did, the better your chances of getting a good one two months from now when it was over. He had identified two he wanted, and he knew he would have a lot going for him in both because of his near-native French and his experience in-country. Paris and Marseille. Wow. You bet. Then all the others, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia … Jesus, Yugoslavia! Surely nobody would send a black man to Yugoslavia!

Would they?

Near Nice, France.

The man called Zulu was riding in the back seat of a chauffeured Daimler and enjoying it. He liked the idea that other people envied him without knowing who he was, some wealthy man made invisible by tinted glass. He was a little wound-up, not bad, nothing like before a fight or the other—a couple of black pills, pulling him up, then a silver to smooth him out. A civilian dose. He touched his sunglasses, which were very dark and very sleek, wrapped back around his temples like the windows of a jet (Bolle, expensive) and a further step toward invisibility. No, toward disguise. This made him smile, too. Zulu was forty and looked younger. A lot tougher than most men of forty. The disfigured nose was a badge of honor, and some women loved it.

The car purred through electronically operated gates that closed behind it, and it swung right and then curved widely left up a semi-circular drive. A man with a rake and a man with a two-way radio watched it; the man with the rake went back to work on a flowerbed, and the man with the radio murmured something and looked intensely serious.

Lascelles was waiting on a terrace. Lascelles was old, old enough that his face had started to show cross-furrows between other furrows, like the cracks in dried mud where a lake had once been. Lascelles had been a colonel, a mayor, a minister, and the real but invisible head of France’s security apparatus. Until he had been forced out. Now he was an angry old man. Not to be underestimated, however. A dangerous, angry old man.

Zulu got out of the big car quickly, his hands just touching the front of his trousers as if he expected the edges of the door to be dirty, swinging his hips out as a woman does, sliding. Erect, he touched the sunglasses and checked his inner self. Was he just a little too high? No, just right. Not nervous. Zulu had not been nervous since he had got big enough not to fear his father’s belt.

“You like the Daimler?” Lascelles said, shaking hands. Meaning nothing.

“Very nice.”

“You picked a pleasant day.” Lascelles’s eyes flicked over the almost fresh cuts on Zulu’s face, then flicked to his hands. Lascelles missed little. “Yesterday, we had rain. Cold!” Lascelles led him along the terrace, making these human sounds, although neither man was very human, smiling a little smile, as if it amused him to be leading this creature, this thing, this gorille manqué along his terrace. He had used all those terms to talk about the man they called Zulu. Not that he wasn’t something of a creature himself.

“Everything is working all right?”

Zulu used silence for his answer. If everything was not all right, he would speak.

They went in through a door to a big, pleasant room full of soft colors like those on the terrace, fabrics with a sheen, a couple of good but unassertive oil paintings. The room did not smell quite right. “I have a task for you,” Lascelles said once they were inside, as if in there it was safe to get serious.

“I need some things, too.” Zulu reached into his jacket, took out a folded paper and handed over a computer-printed list of weapons.

“Well—” Lascelles sat, motioned toward an armchair. “Tit for tat. I have something I want you to do, fairly big.” His face furrowed still more deeply. His head was round, bald, mottled brown. It drew back into his collar.

“My plate is full at home.”

“Nonsense. They have this ‘peace accord,’ NATO have drawn a wavy line on the ground, you are all at peace.” He laughed. “The Americans are putting their nose into something and I need to slice the end off. That will not offend your sensibilities, I think?”

“You know what I think of them.”

“Exactly.” Lascelles went off on a rant that Zulu had heard before, on and on—moral decay, the Jews, Brussels, NATO, the UN. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, Zulu said to himself, his thoughts invisible behind his tinted glasses, although he had his own reasons for hating NATO and the UN.

“I am an exile in my own country,” Lascelles was saying. “I! An honorable exile! A patriot!” His face was red. Like all the French of a certain kind, the ghost of Napoleon always hovered close by him. “The current government of France is deeply unpatriotic, completely subverted by the world state!”

“What do you want me to do?” Zulu said, letting his impatience show.

“Africa,” Lascelles said.

“Africa, oh, shit—Not again!”

Lascelles leaned forward. “The UN patched together some of their internationalist crap and stopped the Rwandan genocide before a satisfactory conclusion was reached. That’s how they work, to put their army in place. Now they are setting up subversion centers all over that part of Africa. The Americans have satellites up above there, too. Hand in glove. But central Africa is French territory. It has always been French territory. One cannot be soft about such matters. One must be hard. Whatever one’s humanitarian feelings, one must be hard. For the greater good.”

“Absolutely.”

“The UN and the Americans must be driven out of central Africa. I will put Africa back together later, after the threat is finished. They will welcome me, you will see. I—we—have old friends there, old clients, I need only speak a word—” His eyes narrowed. “Mobutu!” he whispered. “Very powerful. Very rich. Absolutely my client.”

“Oh, God, Africa.” Zulu rolled his head on the back of the couch. One day in and out, shooting down that airliner, that had been all right. Once in a way, it was all right. Still, he needed weapons. And his war in Bosnia was on hold. “NATO-compatible weapons this time. No old Russian stuff, Lascelles.”

“Yes, yes, yes—!” Lascelles waved the list. “I don’t do these things myself.” He sounded whiny, at the same time arrogant. I give it to some underling, he meant. Arms dealing was a detail, he meant. “You will get your weapons.”

“Soon, it has to be soon, or no deal. To go to Africa, you know—”

Lascelles’s eyes looked shrewd. Like a child saying a naughty word, he said, “One of your centers in the Serbian zone got knocked over, I heard, is that what I heard?” His eyes flicked over Zulu’s face and hands again. “You were there?”

Zulu made a face. “A little one, nothing.” It definitely had been more than nothing, but he wouldn’t admit it to this old spider; it had outraged him, some bunch of shitkickers from UNPROFOR driving him out of one of his own places. Forcing him to jump through a fucking window with some American shithead shooting at him! The amphetamines pushed his anger up and he almost let it show, but he brought himself down, stayed quiet. Pretended to deal with it. “Pustarla, big deal—! The fucking UN!” He flexed his right knee and felt the pain of the long gash he had got, jumping through that window.

“Internationalism!” Lascelles cried. “You see? You see? It’s all part of their plan!”

Zulu didn’t in fact see. He didn’t care a dog’s fart about internationalism. He believed that Greater Serbia could exist in and of itself, separate from the world, above the world. When they had exterminated the Muslims, when the Croats were subdued, when Greater Serbia was a clean and pure state, then they would close their borders and be themselves. To hell with the UN and the US, was his view. To hell with Europe. And fuck France. But, just now, he needed Lascelles.

“What do I have to do in Africa?” Zulu said.

“For now, go back to Serbia and select good men. Say two companies. Elite. Then I will need to send you down there to start things, and if it really explodes, I will need you and your men there perhaps for a month. White troops go through Africans like a hot knife.”

“Money?” Zulu said shrewdly. “White men get good money to fight in Africa.”

Lascelles’s furrows folded in on themselves a little, as if he were pulling into himself. This was his version of a smile. “France will be fair.”

He meant that he would be fair, but he thought of himself as France.

He put his head back, closed his eyes. The meeting was over.

Zulu waited a few seconds to show that he couldn’t be dismissed like a flunkey, but Lascelles ignored him, and he got up and put on his sunglasses and went out to the terrace. As soon as he got out there, the air was sweeter. The odd smell inside was Lascelles.

Zulu went down the terrace, thinking about his war and the loss of the place in Pustarla. Him, the commander, being forced to go out a window and run through the snow like a naked girl. Some goddamned American shooting at him—he’d heard the voice, knew that accent all too well. Rage surged up again and he let it go this time. Rage was good for him, he believed, a rush like a drug. He could do a lot on rage. Africa. For a little while, maybe, while things were quiet back home, until the “peace accord” fell apart. But he had to stay focused. Not get sidetracked by Lascelles’s adventures in Africa. A means to an end. There was no rage for him in Africa. The American who forced him out that window. Yes, he felt rage about that. Greater Serbia. Yes, there was rage. The fucking Muslims, the goddam Croats. Lice. Vermin. Things. Rage. Rage.

The Med, aboard USS Jefferson.

Alan had Ensign Baronik working on the squadron IOs brief, the intel specialists prepping the visuals, and his senior chief cruising the ASW spaces in case there was any chance of running anything against a real target. He felt a pang of envy for the guys who would do it if he found anything. Alan had been a pretty good back seat not so long ago, and he’d run a line on a Russian sub that had almost got his S-3B goosed with the periscope when it had surfaced. Great days. Great for a young man, anyway. Now, he was a senior lieutenant, about to become an acting CAG AI, in—he checked his watch—six hours and thirty-nine minutes.

Because LCDR Suter was leaving.

Leaving his IO’s post, leaving the ship, leaving the Navy. To take “something better,” he’d said with that sneer-smile he used, as if the something better was really better, and none of you merely mortal shmucks would understand how much better. Resigning usually took six months to a year.

Alan’s guess was that Suter had had a greatly accelerated resignation because somebody out there, somebody with real clout, wanted him enough to twist arms.

The raid on the torture center in the Serbian zone seemed like a distant memory now, except for flashes of the man he had shot and of that shadow on the wall—the witch. Or gargoyle. Or whatever that had been. And the name Zulu, which had been on the photograph and which the men who had been tortured there had spoken with fear.

He had got some medals out of it, for what that was worth—one from the Italians that said Coraggio e onore, and a letter from the Canadians, commending him for “extraordinary efforts in intelligence support and acquisition.” The Kenyans had been downright embarrassing (“glorious achievements to enhance our medical work under the banner of the United Nations”).

Had he done well? Had it meant anything, that dawn raid? Men had died; he had killed—what had it accomplished? They had saved two men from more torture, he supposed. One of the victims they’d brought out had had a fractured sinus, wa Danio had said, a broken nose and broken teeth, three broken ribs where they had kicked the water out of him. One had died. One of the bodies had had both eyelids cut away. And for what? Nobody seemed to know. For being young and Muslim. When he thought of the man who had had his eyelids cut off, Alan thought, How can a human being do that? and then he felt a revulsion and anger that gave the Bosnian raid a bad taste.

He had tried to write to a friend who was a Navy cop, Mike Dukas, about it. What kind of people do these things? Maybe a cop would understand. Mike, it’s you guys they need there, not me. They need law. Was that what peacekeeping was?

Now, back on the boat, Alan was going down the list of classified pubs for which Suter was responsible, because Suter was leaving and had to sign off on the classified pubs in his care. The list had already been done and checked by Suter himself, but Alan knew that Suter would screw him somehow if he could. So on and on he went, Alan sinking lower and lower in his chair, until, as he had feared, he found two titles that had been checked off by Suter but that in fact couldn’t be found. Alan wrote a memo and put it in the folder, and then he indicated the missing two as unaccounted for on Suter’s sign-over receipt, initialed the two, signed “with exceptions as noted,” and sent the pages off to Suter. Another stack arrived shortly after.

Suter put his head in at 1717. “I’m out of here in a half-hour.”

Alan went on signing.

“I hear you found two docs missing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They were there this morning when I did them.”

“They’re not there now.”

“You know they’ll turn up.”

“Yep.” He went on signing. “I’m sure that right now they’re under somebody’s rack, and when we do a final fore-and-aft sweep before hitting the beach, they’ll come out on the end of a broom and we’ll get them back.” Scrawl, flap.

“Why not just sign off for them now, then?”

“Because they’re not in my possession, and that’s what I have to sign for.” He looked up, grinned. “It’s the law.”

“You know, Craik, you’re the most arrogant cocksucker I’ve ever had to serve with.” He sounded almost genial.

Alan finished signing and pushed the orders across the desk. Later, he would wish he had thought to say, Clearly, I don’t have your experience with cocksuckers, but he didn’t. “You’ll miss your flight if you don’t hurry, sir,” is what he said.

Suter stared into his face, Alan into his. Finally, Suter uncrossed his arms, picked up the orders, and straightened. “Jesus, I’m glad I’m leaving the Navy,” he said. He started out. “I hope you fall on your ass trying to do my job, Craik.”

Alan stopped by the mail slots and found a letter from his wife, which he read in the quiet of the maintenance office, with Senior Chief Prue thoughtfully giving him some space. Everything was good at home—Mikey was growing like a weed; the dog had eaten part of a sweater Rose’s mother had knitted specially; Rose thought she had a line on a great posting for her next tour, some project called Peacemaker. He headed for a briefing with a grin on his face.

Near Atlanta, Georgia.

Mike Dukas was thoroughly pissed. He had just taken part in a bust that was supposed to be a big coup for the FBI and his own agency, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and all they had got was an empty house, five hours of tedium, and a U-Haul full of computers and computer disks. Never mind that the disks were loaded with pornography; nobody knew that yet, and, anyway, the porn wouldn’t have any significance to him for months.

And it was all Alan Craik’s fault. No, be honest; not Craik’s fault—his fault, his, Mike Dukas’s. It was the frayed end of an old operation that had started with Al Craik years before, and Dukas couldn’t let go of it. In part because he was nuts about Craik’s wife. And thought of Craik himself as a very, very close friend.

Oh shit. Dukas felt lousy. A day wasted, and for what?

He sat in his rental car and thought about driving to the airport and waiting for the plane and flying back to DC and having nothing to report. What was he accomplishing, anyway? And what waited for him at home—three AWOL sailors, five domestic disputes, two incidents of racial hatred? This was what a Navy cop did?

So he took from his pocket a letter he had just got from Craik and read it over again, and he was envious. It was all about some raid Craik had been on in Bosnia, shooting and everything. Helos! Grenades! Prisoners! And what the hell was Dukas doing? Sitting on his ass in a rental car and mooning over a busted operation.

And a line that went right to the heart. Mike, it’s you guys they need there, not me. They need law.

It was like an order from a friend: Get involved.

But how?

Well, he was a cop—a Navy cop, sure, but a cop. They must need good cops in Bosnia. They must have criminals. War criminals. Hey, there was an idea. Catching war criminals—what could be a more honorable duty for a cop than that?

War criminals. Now, who was hiring cops to go after war criminals?

He started the car. The UN. No, it wasn’t the UN who went after war criminals; it was the World Court. Somebody he knew must know somebody over there. Somebody—

Langley, Virginia.

At CIA headquarters, a man who disliked Alan Craik as fiercely as Dukas and O’Neill liked him was, for a moment, thinking about Alan. His mind flicked over the subject of the young naval officer on its way somewhere else—flicked, felt distaste, moved on. Alan Craik was one of his failures: he’d tried to recruit Craik, had told him only a little lie, and Craik had gone all moral on him and humiliated him. The little shit.

George Shreed leaned on his stainless steel canes, looking down from the window of his new corner office and, after touching Craik as you’d touch a sore spot and flinching away, thinking that it was time to do something big. Something really big. A riiiillly big shew, as that asshole used to say on television.

He had been kicked upstairs. Downstairs, his former assistant had his old job. She had betrayed him, too, and now she had his old job, which she was already making a mess of. Good. He must see to it that she really made a mess of it.

In the meantime, he was going to launch something big.

A light flashed on his desk; he hobbled to it and hit a button and a woman’s voice said, “Lieutenant-Commander Suter is here.”

“Send him in.”

He waited, standing behind his desk, his weight on the canes. He had a handsome face made haggard by constant pain, a long body with big shoulders from heaving it around on his hands. He had probably risen as high in the Central Intelligence Agency now as he ever would, and he knew it, and he was going to start having his fun.

The door opened. Suter paused in the doorway.

Shreed smiled. “Come on in.” He propped the canes against his desk and swung himself into the armchair. “I was going to call you, anyway. You settling in?”

“I know the route from my car to my office, anyway.”

“I have a task for you,” Shreed said. “You ready?”

Suter bobbed his head, cocking an eyebrow; it was a kind of acknowledgment or recognition.

Shreed took his time in settling himself at his desk. He leaned the steel canes against a spot that had held them so often it was worn. “I took you on,” Shreed said, “because I figured you’re my kind of bastard. Isn’t that what you figure?”

The faintest of smiles touched Suter’s face. “We seem to have a kind of meeting of the minds, yes.”

“You’re getting a late start here. I’ve pulled you in above a lot of other people who therefore hate your guts. Hate is good for a career. You just have to keep ahead of it. You’re used to being hated, I’m sure. Where did you get that suit?”

Suter was wearing a dark-blue rag that had nothing to recommend it except the crease in the trousers. He reddened and named a department store.

“It looks it. Anyway, I’m sending you someplace else—a place called the Interservice Virtual Intelligence Center.” He grinned. “I’ve made a deal with the devil. You’re going to see he keeps his part of the bargain. That may be just the suit for the devil.” He waved a hand. “Sit, sit; this is going to take a while. What do you know about a project called Peacemaker?”

Atlantic Fleet Headquarters, Norfolk.

“Project Peacemaker!”

In Conference Room B of LantFleet HQ, Alan Craik’s old squadron-mate LCDR “Rafe” Rafehausen was having a briefing. The briefing was part of a larger planning conference for Battle Group Seven, now in its formative stages as it prepared to join Sixth Fleet late that year. Consisting of the CV Andrew Jackson, a Tico-class missile cruiser, and associated destroyers, subs, and support ships, it would carry the flag of Admiral Rudolph Newman aboard the Jackson with Air Wing Five. For Rafe Rafehausen, this would be a make-or-break cruise: he was to join VS-49 as XO only three months before the battle group put to sea, with the awesome certainty that if he did the job well he would become skipper of the squadron two years after he signed on. At the moment, he was sitting in on the planning conference as a guest of the current VS-49 skipper and exec.

The briefer was a captain. Everything about him said he was a hardnose. He was laying it out as if he had been up to the mountain and got the plans on stone. He summarized: “And so this cruise will have two primary responsibilities—Project Peacemaker, in Libya’s Gulf of Sidra in December, and the ongoing support of blockade and air ops in the former Yugoslavia.

“Project Peacemaker will require that we secure the Gulf of Sidra for the Peacemaker launch vessel. This will be a major undertaking involving air and surface elements within fifteen miles of the Libyan coast. We will do a complete, repeat, complete fleet exercise that will mock up the entire operation. Fleetex is currently scheduled for October of this year. That is six-plus months to prepare for units that at this time are not in a high state of readiness!” He glared around the room. Full commanders avoided his hard eyes; lieutenant-commanders blanched. It was no secret that the fleet was below full manpower and that training was behind.

The captain held up a fist, from which an index finger pointed upward like a preacher’s. “Fleetex, Bermuda, October 96.” Another finger pointed. “To sea, November 96.” A third finger. “Peacemaker, Gulf of Sidra, December 96!” He glared. “Questions?” He said it like a man who dared anybody to ask a question.

A courageous commander murmured, “Is that date for Peacemaker firm?”

“Why wouldn’t it be firm?” the captain shouted.

A rash lieutenant, one of the few people in the room below lieutenant-commander, stood up, and Rafehausen groaned inwardly. The lieutenant said, “Bosnia and Peacemaker, that’s it, sir?”

“What else would you like?” the captain snarled.

“Uh—sir, Africa is ready to—” Rafehausen groaned silently again and thought Oh, Christ, another Al Craik!

The captain barked like an aroused Doberman. “Africa’s not even on my map! Bosnia and Peacemaker! Any other questions?”

Rafe had a question, but there was no point in asking it of this guy. It was a question that only Rafe himself could answer, anyway: How am I going to get an under-manned, inexperienced bunch of guys ready for sea in six lousy months? He looked at the man who would by then be his skipper. The guy had a reputation as a screamer and a morale-destroyer. My fucking A! Rafe thought.

Norfolk Naval Base.

“Peacemaker? The hell with it!”

Vice-Admiral Rudolph Newman was the flag commander of Battle Group Seven, which was beginning to take shape. “We’re going to do this right, for once,” he said. He sounded angry, as he always sounded, even when he wasn’t angry. “No Mickey Mouse!” he said.

“No, sir.” His flag intelligence officer was the hardnosed captain who had done the briefing where Rafe Rafehausen had sat in. With the admiral, however, he was sweet as honey. He had served with Newman twice before and knew what the man was like.

“Nothing we can do about this Peacemaker crap,” the admiral growled, “so we’ll have to do it. Keep something in the Fleetex script about it. You know how they scream if somebody’s pet project doesn’t get its due.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I want a fleet exercise with guts. I want the men and officers who serve under me to know who the enemy is, and I want them to have this experience so they’ll be ready!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Victor-II class submarines. MiG-29s. I want my subs hunted by whatever the latest is that the Soviets have got—the Helix A?”

“Mmm—KA-27PL.”

“Well, extrapolate an upgrade. You know as well as I do the Soviets have one by now. The best, understand? Kirov-plus cruisers. I want an exercise against their best. I don’t want any of this ‘real-world’ crap. ‘Real-world’ means unreal world. Get me?”

“The, um, LantCom Planning Office is scripting a scenario. I’ve been picking their brains. They’re thinking, um, one threat as Libya and the other as Yugoslavia.”

“Negative! See, that’s exactly what I mean. That’s what they’d call ‘real world.’ We can lick those pathetic bastards without a rehearsal. Negative that. You script me a Fleetex that puts me against the Soviets in waters where they can bring their good stuff to bear. Get me?”

The IO nodded. He cleared his throat. “I’ll leave it to you to deal with LantCom, sir?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Interservice Virtual Intelligence Center, Maryland.

“Peacemaker?”

Colonel Han was Chinese-American, an engineer. Suter, fresh from his briefing by his acidic new boss, George Shreed, disliked Han on sight. Han, he could tell, was Mister Nice Guy. Well, screw that.

“Let me put you in the big picture first,” Han said when he had settled behind his desk. “You know what IVI is, or you wouldn’t be here.” He pronounced the acronym for Interservice Virtual Intelligence like “ivy.” The halls of IVI. His round face smiled on Suter.

“Communications research,” Suter replied, “which is why it falls under the Agency’s umbrella.”

Han grunted. He was turning a ballpoint pen in stubby fingers. “The Agency’s mandate inside the US is communications, right.” He smiled again, but Suter suspected he disliked Suter on sight as much as Suter had disliked him. “So your responsibility will include keeping communications separate from anything else, anything that isn’t part of the CIA mandate. Right? I mean, that’s partly why you’re here. Right?”

“What’re you getting at, Colonel?”

“You don’t want your agency to get involved in things outside its bailiwick, right?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

Han looked up at him and they stared at each other. Han dropped the pen. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

They started at the top floor of the three-story building, where there was a suite of offices and meeting rooms that would have suited one of the new high-tech, high-risk companies. Suter thought that there was something vaguely pushy about the place, a bit too much of a good thing. “We entertain up here,” Han said. Our friends in Congress, he meant. At least that was the way Suter had heard it from Shreed.

The next floor down was a work floor, endless cubicles, an outer ring of small offices, some sort of atrium that looked down at the security desk and the lobby and up at the rain that was falling on a glass dome. In the back was a big, windowed cafeteria where people were already sitting drinking coffee. Again, there was the feeling of a start-up, lots of very young people, jeans and T-shirts, few neckties. “We hire them for their brains,” Han said. No explanation.

There were three floors below the surface. Each had its own security check and a security lock where, for a few seconds, they were held between closed gates. “If you’re claustrophobic, you’re not for us,” Han said. He held up a card to a television camera while they waited inside the lock, and a voice said, “Now the other gentleman, please.” Han moved Suter forward with pressure on his arm, and Suter turned his face up to be seen and then held up the temporary pass he’d been given. “Thank you,” the voice said. Suter couldn’t tell whether it was a human voice or a computer.

Down there, attempts had been made to disguise the fact that it was underground, but you couldn’t make windows where the outdoors was solid earth. It was bright and colorful, but at the end of a day a lot of people would breathe fresh air with real hunger. The spaces, as if to try to compensate, were larger, the cubicles fewer. The people were older, more male than female; Suter thought he recognized the look of ex-military. Uniforms, he knew, were not allowed.

The second below-ground level had at least two laboratories and a model-making shop. Han made this part of the tour pretty perfunctory, as if these were nuts-and-bolts places, not where the real work went on. Then they got in the elevator and started down to S3.

“So,” Han said. “What do you think?”

“Where’s Peacemaker?” Suter said. “It’s the reason I’m here.”

They got out of the elevator and went through the security check and into the lock. When they stepped out of the lock, Han said, “I think I’ll take you right to the general and let him explain Peacemaker to you.”

Suter asked a couple of questions as they walked along the central corridor, but Han didn’t answer. He didn’t like pushy questions, was what he was saying.

A few women could be seen down here. Suter eyed them, looking for a hit. He had been married, now was not. In fact, it was the end of the marriage that had freed him to leave the Navy—no, actually, freed him to let loose the ambition he had been holding in check. She had never liked the ambitious Suter. She made me a different person. Limited me. With her, I was just another nice shmuck. It never occurred to him to wonder what she had thought about it, or if she had been another person in the marriage, too. He was simply terribly glad to be rid of her. Except for the sex, so he was now looking around.

“The general” was Brigadier Robert F. Touhey, USAF, a small, round man about fifteen pounds over a healthy weight, with shrewd blue eyes, a sidewall haircut, and just a touch of the Carolinas in his voice. He was wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt and a blue tie, as if it was summer; when he stood up, he was several inches shorter than Suter, but he had a handshake like a Denver boot. They made polite sounds, and Touhey let go of Suter’s hand, and Han muttered something that caused Touhey to give him the briefest of cold looks before he said, “Sure, okay, you take off, Jackie.” Then he motioned Suter to a chair.

Suter sat, opening his coat. The room was hot. Touhey plopped back into his desk chair and said, “What’d you do to old Jackie? He don’t like you.”

“No idea. What makes you think he doesn’t like me?”

“I can tell.” Suter leaned back. Touhey’s face was made for smiling, and, even in repose, it seemed to have the beginnings of a smile. Touhey seemed to be smiling at Suter now—but was he? “So,” Touhey said. “How’s my old buddy George Shreed?”

Suter nodded, smiled. “He sends his regards.”

“Regards!” Touhey laughed. “What’d George tell you about me?”

“He said you were the best empire-builder in the American military.”

Touhey guffawed. “And you better believe it! Alla this—” Touhey waved a hand that included the office, the building, the idea “—is my empire. I grabbed it; I rule it; and I’m gonna go on ruling it. Administrations come and go; Touhey endures. How’d you connect up with Shreed?”

“He got in touch with me.”

“What about?”

“Somebody who was going to serve under me.”

“Good or bad? Come on, George don’t dick around; what’d he want?”

“He wanted to warn me.” In fact, George Shreed of the CIA had wanted to tell him that Alan Craik was a thorough-going shit, and Suter should be careful. Shreed really hated Craik. “We had lunch, hit it off.”

“He recruited you?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t guess, okay? I don’t like vague shit. I’m a scientist and a politician, call me a scientific politician. Vagueness is for people got time to dick around. I don’t. George recruit you?”

“Yes.”

“Right there, one lunch? Man, you came cheap. So, what—he pulled strings, got you outa the Navy quick-time? Musta wanted you. If George Shreed wanted you, I better watch my ass.” Touhey smiled.

“He was moving up to a new responsibility. He wanted to reorganize.”

“Right. ‘No contingent trails.’ Okay. He sent over a file on you; you look okay. The impression I get is, you’re the kinda man can always go into the woods and find a honey tree—am I right about that? I think I am. Divorced. No kids. You a loner, Suter?”

“Maybe. I never thought of it that way.”

“‘He travels the fastest who travels alone.’ Kipling. Okay. Whatta you know about Peacemaker?”

Suter was sweating. Could he take off the suitcoat? He wasn’t quite sure how to handle this highly intelligent redneck. He decided to wear it and sweat. “I know it’s just coming out of the closet. That it’s a low-earth-orbit satellite system. That it’s part of an intelligence-communications effort. That it’s controversial. That it rang Colonel Han’s bells when I mentioned it before he did.”

“Go on.”

Suter shifted his weight and a rivulet of wet trickled down his right side. “Shreed told me it’s a weapon.”

“Ri-i-ight! By which you mean, it’s a weapon in this room, but you say it anyplace else and it’s deny, deny, deny. Old George is with me on this one; we see eyeball to eyeball. Common ground down someplace where his ideology and my theory about intelligence come together, although it’s like an ox and a bear hitched to the same plow. George and I want this thing for different reasons, but we don’t see any purpose in killing each other just yet, and we’re kissy-kissy around Congress and the White House so’s the project will succeed. You being George’s boy, I expect you to go along one hunnerd percent. Right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Damn right. Let me tell you about Peacemaker. No! Let me tell you about intelligence. Intelligence and the modern battle. Now, you’re an intel guy. Wha’d you do in the Navy? Carrier intel—what do you guys call it, CAG AI? Right. You got lots of intel from this source and that, you patched it together and strained it and shaped it and you looked at the target lists and the briefing books that Uncle provided, and then you made up something comprehensible for the jet jocks, and they took off and did what B.F. Skinner tried to get pigeons to do, which is use your intel to carry a weapon to target. Now, that’s asinine.

“Here’s my theory of intelligence. Intelligence and force projection in the electronic world are the same thing. To have a thought should be the same as to use that thought. Idea is action. Stay with me here: the usual model, the model you used on your aircraft carrier, is pre-electronic. It’s all about the failure of intelligence that’s built into slow communication. The great example is the Battle of New Orleans. The British come up into the swamps and Andrew Jackson and a lotta people shoot the ass off them, and the British tuck their tails and go away. Only trouble is, the war had been over six weeks before they started.

“When you got slow communications, you in effect got no intelligence worth the name—everything happens the night before the battle, the day of the battle, the moment of the battle. The intel guy is just some no-respect major who can read maps. Who matters is the guy who has the muscles to carry the weapon.

“But come up to the 1980s. Now I can take a photo and have it come up simultaneously on a missile that’s already in the air. The missile don’t need any pigeon to drive it; it’s got the electronic brains to drive itself, using satellite positioning and my photo. I drive it to the target. Me—the intel guy. But do they let me do it? No—they turn it over to the guys who used to carry the weapon and still want to get their rocks off.

“Now come to the 1990s. What’re we doing, mostly? We’re giving jet jocks briefing books and briefings and kneepad maps and photos and satellite coverage, and they fly off and make the same fucking mistakes that they and the pigeon could have made without all that help. Who’s still the least respected officer in a squadron? The intel guy. But who’s the one knows the most about the target? The intel guy.

“So, here’s my theory of intelligence: cut the crap. Cut out the middleman. Put your intel guy where all the electronic fields come together, and give him the button.

“That’s what Peacemaker is—the world’s first intel-driven killer. War with an arrow and no archer. George tell you how it works?”

Suter shook his head. He was a little dazzled.

“See, the problem that we saw was, you put stuff into a high orbit, you got a major launch involvement, and still you got a hell of a weight problem. You can put up your electronics, sure, but conventional weapons are heavy stuff. So we come up with something out of a sci-fi novel, no shit. What makes a conventional weapon heavy? Fuel and explosive. Okay, do away with both a them, you got your problem licked. Whatcha got out there in orbit instead of fuel for your weapon? Gravity. Whatcha gonna put up there instead of explosives? Manmade meteorites. Like a goddam cafe-curtain rod, only made of either ceramic or spent uranium, we ain’t decided which—doing tests next month from the high-altitude research aircraft out in Nevada. I favor the uranium, because I know that at Mach 5 that stuff will explode hardened concrete, I mean not just knock pieces off it, but fucking explode it!

“With the weight problem solved, we conceived Peacemaker as a low orbiter so it can be launched any old place. But low orbit means it won’t stay up long, maybe five days. Long enough. Peacemaker 1 will carry forty rods and will be in-orbit maneuverable plus or minus five hundred klicks. Above the range of all known missiles and aircraft. It’ll carry an onboard computer not much shabbier than an early Cray, plus receivers direct for optical, side-look, satellite TV, infrared, or digital data. I won’t say the thing will be able to think, but it’ll be able to compare and prioritize, and it will always be in direct contact with here.”

“Expensive,” Suter said. What he wanted to say was, That’s the greatest thing I ever heard. “Awfully expensive.”

“There’s enough pork in the Star Wars budget to do this little old thing ten times over. There’s so much pork, I oughta get some hickory sticks and start me a barbecue place. ‘Touhey’s Hog Heaven’!” He laughed. He was excited, too, just talking about it. “That’s why I need George. George can carve a pig about as good as anybody in Washington.”

“How far along is the project?” Suter found that his voice was hoarse.

“We’re going to prototype in six weeks; legal is cleaning up the contracts. They got a model upstairs, I expect Jackie whisked you by that, but you’re welcome to see it. I want to test the end of this year.”

“But—”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s destabilizing as hell.”

Touhey grinned. “Direct contravention of the ABM treaty. That’s my view of it, although there’s controversy in-house. I’ll let the lawyers work that out. Frankly, I don’t give a shit. Neither does George, who’s in it—between you and me—precisely because it’s destabilizing. It fits old George’s ideology, and he ain’t exactly over there on the far left. But you hit the sore point, yeah, and that’s why the only word we’ve leaked on Peacemaker is that it’s an intel-comm satellite. Not a weapon. That’s the way it’s gonna stay for the public and part of the Congress for the foreseeable future. But sometime we gotta go public with the weapon part, because what this is, is a weapon of fear. It don’t do squat if people don’t know about it.”

“A deterrent.”

“Well, wouldn’t you be deterred if you knew somebody could position an untouchable machine over your house and drop meteorites on it at Mach 5?” Touhey leaned back and began to scrabble in a drawer, coming up with a pack of cigarettes. “That’s why we’re gonna sell this as a support to UN peacekeeping. Our likeliest demo will be Yugoslavia—pardon, the former Yugoslavia. We’re gonna put a Peacemaker up in the Mediterranean, current plans are the Gulf of Sidra, coordinate with Navy’s Sixth Fleet—I expect you to be a help there—and we’re gonna put it up and juke it around in orbit over some of their real estate and suggest—merely suggest, meaning we’re gonna do a little discreet leaking—that this little toy might be compatible with some kinda weaponry. We think it’ll get their attention. Meanwhile, in secret, we’re gonna drop some rods on a pile of rock in the South Atlantic and see what survives.” He fiddled with a ball of paper. “You can imagine the UN debate if it’s the UN that thinks it’s gonna benefit. They won’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

“Give it to the UN?”

“Now, you know we’d never do that. We may say we will, but we won’t. Remember Reagan’s offer to give Star Wars to the world? Like that. But we’ll use it in a good cause, you bet, and I for one am not at all happy about a set of tough guys kicking ass, including women and kids, in the name of what they call ethnic cleansing, when their ethnic ain’t much to look at to begin with. And we need the PR, ’cause this is gonna be one mother of a fight when it goes public.”

“I’m supposed to be part of that.”

Touhey grinned at him. “You’re gonna be the targeting officer.” He grinned even more when he saw how startled Suter was. “George wants you to be. You’re gonna be the oversight on his investment. You got an office on this floor for the duration of the project, plus you’ll get space at our DC connection. You’re gonna ride along with me on some trips up there. You play golf?”

“Some.”

“‘Some’ don’t get the hay in. Learn to play. We get a lot of our support over a good game.” He smiled. “Not too good, mind.” He stood. He had worked a cigarette out of the pack, was now holding it in his fingers and getting ready to work a lighter with the other. There were No Smoking signs all over the building. “You’re gonna liaise with George, but in-house here you’re part of the targeting and data flow ladder. You can be useful there. Work hard.”

“I always work hard.” Suter said it proudly, but it brought an unreadable glance from Touhey—maybe slightly challenging?

“We’re about to expand. You’re part of the expansion. In the empire-building business, if you don’t keep getting bigger, they cut you off at the knees and all of a sudden you’re small.”

The lighter flared.

The Med.

USS James Madison was going home.

The great wheel turned, and in the Adriatic, the carrier battle group began its move toward home port; in Norfolk, the outgoing battle group that would replace them, BG 6, was making its final preparations to sail.

Not that very moment. Not even that day. But the Madison had turned her bow away from the Bosnian coast, and she had headed down the length of Italy and around the boot, and her crew knew they wouldn’t come that way again, not this tour. Some of the tension in the ship began to ease, as if all at once people had got a good night’s sleep and nobody was quite so down.

Alan Craik was going home. His air-intel team was finally turning to leave the Med, and just in time. The men and women were tired; the machines were tired. They had really pulled together after Suter had left—Alan didn’t kid himself that it was his presence that made things better; Suter’s absence was most of it—and now they were efficient and smart, but they were worn out. They were good kids; their shiny newness had worn off under the strain of constant planning and activity, and the N2, with Alan, had quickly repaired their gun-shy (or Suter-shy) attitudes. Alan had preferred to let them learn with minimal chiding. Now they were a solid team, and Alan reflected wryly that, like most military organizations, they had hit their stride just as their duty together was coming to an end.

Peacekeeping was wearing. There wasn’t anything to strive toward; it was all just keeping on. There would never be any gongs for them for “winning” the war—or the peace—in Bosnia. It just went on. And would go on, he thought. We’ll be back, was what he thought but never said to his people.

So the Madison rounded the toe of the boot and charged up to Naples, and when they pulled into the bay for their last run ashore, the whole battle group seemed to put Bosnia behind them. They poured ashore by the ferry-load and dispersed over the streets like ants on spilled honey. Alan, walking up toward the Royal Palace, could hear some of them whooping a block away. Bad PR, but—get a life!

That night he took his gang to a small restaurant called Pappagallo. They pushed a lot of tables together and shouted back and forth, and some unabashed flirting went on between the men and women that had been suppressed on the boat. A couple of Italian songs and half of them will be in bed together, he thought, and he turned the subject to Bosnia and peacekeeping. It was always the great subject, and it had the same effect now as a cold shower. On the boat, it had almost led to people’s not speaking to each other—Why are we here? What’s our duty? Are we the world’s policeman? What’s wrong with the people in the Balkans? Why can’t we bomb the fuckers?—but now the tone was elegiac, as of people who had done their best and had to leave with things no worse, perhaps no better. Baronik summed up for them. “There’s hope,” he said. He was a little drunk, mostly a bit more laid back than usual, but maybe showing off for the benefit of LTjg Mary Colley. “Folks, there’s hope! Look at all the other places that have had this kind of shit. Neighbor killing neighbor! Village burning village! It does come to an end. It does! Strong government and economic prosperity can break the chain of violence.” His voice was passionate. Seeing doubt in some of the faces, he said, “Look at the Anglo-Scottish border between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries!” Somebody groaned. “Look at the Norman Vexin!” Everybody groaned.

“Look at the time,” Alan said. He waved for the check.

“It will happen, Al!” Baronik said. He glanced at LTjg Colley.

“Of course it will.” Alan remembered the torture chamber in the Serbian zone. Well, maybe it would happen.

Washington, DC.

Mike Dukas pushed open the door of his apartment with a foot and heard his mail, just as it did every night, scrape along the floor as the door pushed it. As he did every night, he thought that the door was a stupid place to put a mail slot. Bending, groaning because he was a short, wide man, he picked up the mail and threw pieces of it at the wastebasket as he crossed the living room. Junk, junk, bill, junk, credit union, bill—and bingo!

He felt his heart lurch. The top of the envelope had a return address for the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. When he tore the envelope, his hands were shaking. Why did it matter so much? Christ, he didn’t get this nervous with a woman!

“… your very impressive résumé … hope to set up an interview within five days … speed of the essence because … suffering … criminals … a need for leadership and your professional skill.” There was a telephone number that he was asked to call during business hours ASAP.

Dukas was grinning. Sonofabitch!

He pulled the door shut and trotted to his car and drove the five miles to the mall where he knew there was a Borders. There, he leaned into the high counter and said to the very young, pretty attractive woman there, “How you fixed for a Bosnian dictionary?”

“Bosnian?”

“Yeah, like the country formerly known as Yugoslavia.”

“I know what it is.” She smiled. “I read the papers, you know. But I don’t think Bosnian’s a language. It’s an ethnic group, but—” She was talking to the computer with her fingers. A really smart woman. “Uh-uh.” And smiled again. “We got Serbo-Croat, though!”

“Whatever!” Dukas said. He reached for his credit card. He felt like a kid.

Fort Reno, North Carolina.

Harry O’Neill paused with his fingers on the envelope, a prayer on his tongue. But it was too late. Last-minute prayers wouldn’t change what was inside.

He put his left index finger inside the flap at the end where it was ungummed, and it tore; he used the finger to tear raggedly the length of the envelope. He glanced around to see if anybody was watching him, but anybody from his class who was there at that time would have his own envelope and would have sought his own alcove in which to open it. O’Neill leaned still closer to the window, shielding himself almost inside the window drapes. He took out the single sheet of paper and unfolded its three sections.

His assignment for the next three years. Paris? Marseille? Or—?

He almost groaned when he saw it. He stifled real sound but wailed inside. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass.

How will I ever tell my father? and then an instant later with a different kind of shame, How will I ever tell Al Craik?

3

June

Norfolk.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea. He had never learned much of the rest of it. Something about the hunter—“and the hunter home from the hill.” But he wasn’t a hunter. Dukas was the hunter. He was the sailor. And O’Neill? Had he been looking for O’Neill—?

Alan woke. He was home. Relief and gratitude flooded through him. What had he been dreaming—sailor, hunter? He smelled his house, his bed, his wife. His left hand slid across the wrinkled sheet and found her. She made a pleased sound without waking. His hand went up her hip. Squeezed. The dog raised his head. The dog slept on the floor of the bedroom and would have got on the bed in a moment if he’d been encouraged. When Alan wasn’t there, he slept on the floor next to Rose, and he would wake when she did, just like this, raise his head, look at her eyes as he now looked at Alan’s.

“Walk?” Alan whispered.

The dog’s tail thumped on the floor. Alan slipped from the sheets and padded to the bathroom, then to Mikey’s room, the dog following, springing, ready to bark so hard the effort would carry him right off his front feet if Alan so much as murmured walk again. Alan hushed him with a hand on the huge head, caressing the ears, the side of the jaw. He got a big lick on his bare wrist in return.

His son lay on his back, seemingly asleep, but his eyes opened when Alan leaned over him. The light from the hall glinted on the eyes, and the child smiled. Alan’s heart turned over, broke, put itself back together. So this is what it’s like. He had been home for ten days. One night on the ship, drinking coffee on an all-nighter, a shipmate had told him about coming home from a sea tour, always finding his children changed, new. Kids who might one day, unless you were careful, remember mainly that their father was “always away.” He touched his son’s face.

He put on the coffee-maker and got the dog’s leash, and the dog began to prance. The dog wanted to bark; cautioned to stay quiet, he sneezed. His head went up and down so enthusiastically that Alan could hardly get the leash on him. Then they were out the door and into the dawn; he had a momentary flash of dawns on the carrier, one morning when there were no air ops and the great deck had stretched like a field, and the eastern edge of the sky was a bright line like a hot wire. Did some part of him miss it already?

The dog pissed on every vertical object between their house and the end of the block and then got more discriminating as his supply ran low. Beyond the second street was a wood with a kind of stream in it. He let the dog run. Walking along the dark path, listening for the scuffle of the dog in the old leaves, he thought about the dawn when they’d gone to the Serb house in Pustarla. He thought about it a lot, couldn’t get it to settle down into the understory of his mind. The smell of old blood. The tub full of bloody water. The victims. Shooting that guy.

He clipped the dog’s leash to the ring on the collar and started for home. The dog’s pissing had now become purely symbolic—lifting a leg to show what he would do if he could.

“You remind me of some guys I know,” Alan said. The dog grinned. “You ready to eat?” Alan said. The dog surged forward. “Let’s go!” They ran.

Rose was up. When she saw him, her face opened into a lovely smile, a smile you could dream about at sea. He wondered if he did that for her. Rose did her time at sea, too—exec of a helo squadron, a lieutenant-commander who ranked her husband. They kissed. It went on a while; he wondered if they had time to—They did not; she had a meeting at 0830.

“Maybe come home early?”

“We’ve got company, remember?”

He groaned.

“Feed the dog; it’ll take your mind off your troubles. Your idea, having old friends over for a last get-together with O’Neill—remember? I have to shop; it’s Mike and Harry and the Peretzes, that means no red meat, jeez, I dearly love Bea Peretz, but what the hell does she have to go vegetarian for? Can you eat chicken?”

“How about soy burgers?”

“Fuck you and stop that, there isn’t time. Boy, do I come back from sea duty like this? Mike’s bringing somebody. I don’t think it’s serious.”

Something he had been dreaming about. Mike, the hunter— Mike was in love with Rose; everybody knew it, and everybody knew it was hopeless. “Mike’s serious about you,” Alan said. He put down the dog’s water bowl, and the dog made sounds in it as if a duck was trying to take off.

“He’s doing Greek salad and hors d’oeuvres and I’m doing the main stuff, and yes, I think he’s in love with me and I guess that after you he’s the next one I’d want to be that way. That okay?”

Alan grinned. “So long as I’m first.”

“You’re always first.” She cocked her head, listened. “Mikey’s awake.” She started out, turned back to him. “If it’s any comfort to you, just having you in the house makes me so horny I want to scream.” She started out again, swung back. “Correction—moan, not scream. ‘Bye.”

In the Serbian zone, Bosnia.

Zulu nodded, and Radic swung his fist and it hit the bound man with a sound like a ball hitting a glove. Zulu remembered that sound, the old catcher’s mitt heavy on his hand, his father’s throw making it ache even through the thick, old leather.

Radic looked at him. Zulu nodded again. Radic swung; the bound man screamed as the same sound struck. And again. And again. And again.

And now the Americans were here. The first ones had come in March to replace the UN. Zulu hadn’t fought them yet, perhaps never would, but he wished to. He remembered that American voice shouting in the house at Pustarla, then the running through the snow, naked, that voice and the gun booming behind him. Humiliating.

The bound man looked like raw meat. He was stripped to the waist. So was Radic, from whose sleek muscles steam rose in little wisps, like ground mist. It was still cold up here.

“Is he still alive?” Zulu said.

Radic lifted the man’s drooping head and felt in the bloody mess of his throat. He nodded.

“Cut him down.”

The men from the little pigsty of a village watched Radic. Zulu could smell somebody’s shit. They were terrified. That was the idea.

The bound man lay on the ground. Blood soaked into the dirty snow. Zulu handed Radic a sledgehammer. He nodded.

Radic swung the sledge and blood and brains spattered, and the village men began to wail.

Zulu decided that Radic was all right. He would add him to the Special Unit for Africa.

That evening. Norfolk.

As it turned out, Mike Dukas’s date had canceled and he came alone, a little sheepish that he had been stood up but probably glad, really, that he had more time in the kitchen with Rose. Alan could imagine Mike’s mental pictures of himself in their house, a kind of uncle to their child (who had been named after him), a kind of protective presence to Rose. Alan was not sure that those pictures had much to do with reality, except that Mike was a very good friend and they had been through a very tough time together and almost got themselves killed. Now, he listened to Mike and Rose chattering in the kitchen about food, and they made him happy.

Then O’Neill came, and he and Alan made a lot of noise because they hadn’t seen each other in eight months or so. O’Neill was hardly in the door before Alan lunged toward him; O’Neill swayed back and said, “Oh, I say, old chap!” and shook Alan’s hand. Then they boogied for three seconds, then gave each other high fives, and then fell on each other, squeezing and whacking and saying, “Hey, that’s fat, man, you put on fat!” and “Muscle, that’s muscle!” and each told the other he looked great, and they held on to each other and just grinned. Rose came in and smiled at them and kissed O’Neill, and Dukas asked him how the Ranch had been. O’Neill made a face and they all laughed.

“Can you eat vegetarian lasagna?” she said. She sounded worried. O’Neill was big and looked as if he ate whole cows or roadkill or something.

“If I could eat grits, I can eat anything. They gave me grits every goddam morning. I think it was a test!” He and Alan began to remind each other of horrible food they had eaten on the boat. They did a lot more happy shouting. Dukas and Rose looked at each other and shrugged and went back to the kitchen.

The Peretzes were late. The Peretzes were always late. Abe Peretz had been a kind of mentor to Alan, even though his own Naval career had ended when he hadn’t made the cut for commander. Now he worked in the J. Edgar Hoover Building and made sad jokes about being a G-Man.

“How’s the G-Man?” Alan said as he took their coats a few minutes later. They were embracing O’Neill and asking him how the Ranch had been. Alan grinned at Bea. “How’s Mrs G-Man?”

“He got a promotion!” Bea shouted. Bea shouted everything. She was handsome and noisy. “Tell them about your new job!” Bea was wearing black pants and a pale yellow, shiny blouse with a huge saxophone on it in green—the saxophone was a bizarre touch, some kind of joke? Some reference he didn’t get?—and enough buttons left unbuttoned so her very attractive cleavage showed to good advantage. She seemed very up, maybe too much so.

Abe shrugged. “So I got a promotion.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know; it’s classified.”

Bea bounced into a chair, bounced right out again. “You make me so damn mad, Abe, I could kill you! He’s been made department head. I hate false modesty!”

Abe kissed her. “Nobody would ever dare accuse you of it.” He began to explain the organizational structure of FBI headquarters, which was so complex that Alan wondered if he’d finish before the evening ended. Then he realized that O’Neill was chuckling and that what Abe was saying was an elaborate shaggy-dog story, an invention. He began to laugh, too, and Abe, seeing he’d got the joke, roared.

Then Mike and Rose came in with wine, and they all got noisier, and the dog made his rounds, poking his big nose into everybody’s crotch and spilling a wineglass, and there was a lot of loud talk. Dukas told a couple of his Clinton jokes, and Alan glanced over at Rose and saw her face shining, and she gave him a wink and he was glad that Mike’s girl or woman or whatever she was hadn’t come, because these were the people he most liked to be with. He and O’Neill sat next to each other and started saying, “Hey, remember when—” and the others tuned them out. When Alan started listening to them again, Rose was trying to talk Abe Peretz into doing his two weeks of Reserve duty at her new station, someplace called Interservice Virtual Intelligence.

Peretz whistled. “Interservice Virtual Intelligence! Wow, how’d you like them apples? Virtual intelligence, that’s for me! If you can’t have real intelligence, by all means have virtual! What do they do, Rose, teach monkeys to talk, or something?”

“I don’t start for another week. All I know is, it’s a great-looking place, they’ve got a fantastic cafeteria, and they’re hungry for analysts.”

O’Neill squinted his eyes. “As a trained interrogator, I sensed a missed step there. What is a helicopter pilot doing in something called ‘virtual intelligence’?”

“She’s hiking her ass up the ladder toward being an astronaut. I need space-related duty for my next tour.”

O’Neill looked at Alan and swung into his WW-II-Japanese-officer voice. “So, American flygirl, your intelligence is space-related!” And then to Humphrey Bogart: “You’re good, Shweetheart, you’re really good, but there’s something you aren’t telling me.”

Rose batted her eyes. “It’s something about satellites, Mister Spade, and I can’t say more because it’s classified.”

And O’Neill swung into his Big Badass voice and growled, “Who you callin’ a spade?”

“That kind of joking makes me nervous,” Bea Peretz said. Rose and O’Neill laughed, the indulgent way that people laugh about their parents, and Rose began to shepherd them all toward the table. When they were all seated, there was a sudden silence, everybody looking at everybody else, and Bea said, “I think the CIA sucks.”

“I’ll drink to that,” O’Neill said.

“Yeah, that’s about how I’d put it,” Dukas said. “You got a way with words all right, Bea.” He smiled at her. “So how’d our boy O’Neill do at the Agency’s finishing school?” he said.

“Well, our boy O’Neill got through,” O’Neill said. “But not first in his class.” He twirled his wineglass. “Folks, I want to be pampered tonight, because I just spent three days with my parents explaining why I wasn’t first in my class. I mean—it was expected.”

“Ah, why would anybody expect you to be first at that zoo?” Dukas said.

“God, yes,” Alan said. “You’re the wrong type, O’Neill. Harry’s an aristocrat,” he told the others, as if that explained everything. He had heard this theory from O’Neill in the long days and nights on the carrier, years before.

“I thought the CIA was the Old Boys’ Club for Ivy League graduates,” Bea said. She was shoveling down vegetarian lasagna. “William F. Buckley was CIA. George Throttlebottom Bush was CIA. I thought the CIA was the Washington branch of Skull and Bones.”

“Yeah,” O’Neill said, holding out his wineglass as Rose went around the table with a bottle, “but I’m a real aristocrat. My father’s a federal judge, my mother’s a partner in quite a good law firm. One of my ancestors was a governor during Reconstruction. I went to Harvard, not Yale, which is a far, far better place, and you’re talking about the CIA of fifty years ago, which is where I would probably have felt at home, except there was the problem back then of my, um, hue.” He sighed. “My mother thinks I’m slumming.”

Rose did her imitation of O’Neill’s mother. “I just wish he’d meet a nice Spelman girl.” More laughter.

“Anyway,” Alan went on, “you got through the course, which is better than about eighty percent of the people do. So, did you get the orders that you wanted?”

O’Neill raised his eyebrows. “Not quite. No-o-o-t quite. In fact, as the Brits say, not by a long chalk.” He speared a floweret of garlic-sauteed broccoli. “I’m afraid I promised my parents that I was going to France. They thought France was where I deserved to go, being their son, and so they made up their minds that I was going there as a glorious addition to the giddy whirl of Parisian embassy life. But that’s not where Harry is going, and Harry can’t bring himself to tell them.”

There was a silence. “So where is Harry going?” Abe said to break it.

“Well, I was able to tell them a, mm, partial truth. I told them that it was classified and secret and terribly hush-hush, and so I couldn’t say much, but I could say that I was going where the people spoke French. They kind of winked and smiled and looked at each other and were real pleased. So I let it go at that.”

Alan grinned at him. “But you’re going to the other place where they speak French. Montreal?”

“Umm—close, but no cigar.” He gave a half-smile. “Africa. The middle part.”

After another silence, Dukas said, “Well, there’s a certain logic in that.”

“What logic?” Bea roared.

“I know you never noticed, Bea,” Dukas said, “but Harry is black. So are the people in Africa.”

“That’s sick!” she shouted.

Did Dukas and Bea dislike each other? Alan wondered. Maybe at base there was something sexual—an attraction gone wrong?

Rose jumped in to make peace, and Abe said something to his wife, and Alan poured more wine. Uproar, uproar, he thought. Well, it was friendly uproar. So far. Trying to make peace, Dukas muttered, “Well, at least Africa’s kind of quiet just now.”

“Like hell,” Alan said. “I’m worried about him already.”

“I thought the good guys took over in Rwanda and the bad guys got shoved out and the killing was over.”

“There aren’t any good guys,” O’Neill growled. “What there is, is three-quarters of a million refugees who’ve crossed into Zaire, which is ready to go up, anyway, and Uganda and Tanzania thinking it’s a great opportunity for them to make out, and there’s me in the middle of it. Thanks for being worried, Al.” He took more lasagna, to Rose’s obvious relief. “They offered me a choice, Bosnia or Africa. I took Bosnia, because I thought I could do the Jugs a spot of good, as the Brits used to say. So they sent me to Africa.”

“Sounds like the Navy.” He knew that under his jokes, O’Neill was worried. Probably about his parents’ reaction. They demanded a lot of him, and getting a posting to Africa would be “disappointing”—as in We’re disappointed in you, Harold. His parents would have preferred even Bosnia, was the implication, because it was in Europe—a place with a history and civilized people who just happened to be massacring each other. Alan thought of the torture barn and the man who had been on the “airplane.”

They were into dessert—Sicilian cassata from a recipe of Rose’s mother’s—and the uproar had quieted down when Bea got on the subject of Israel and then of Jonathan Pollard, the man convicted of turning American classified materials over to the Israelis.

“Pollard is a hero!” Bea cried.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dukas growled.

Bea threw down her napkin. She was goddamned if she was going to listen to anti-Semitic crap, she told them all.

“I don’t have to be an anti-Semite to think an American who sells out his country is a traitor, Bea. Get a grip.”

She scrambled to her feet and her chair tipped over. “I take this seriously!” she cried. Abe was on his feet and waving them both down, saying Don’t, don’t, and they were out of the room.

“You guys shut up,” Rose said. “She’s stressed out about something.” She went after them; seconds later, Abe came back.

“I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry—Al—She’s upset, it’s been—She found that Jessica’s on the pill, okay? Just found out today.”

Jessica was fourteen.

Dukas reared back. “I’m sorry, Abe. I won’t take that crap about Pollard from anybody.”

When Rose came back, they were all looking at their hands. “She’s going to lie down for a little. Lighten up, guys.”

“The perfect hostess,” Alan said, smiling.

“Yeah, somebody compliment me on the food, or something. Wonder Woman Cooks!” She picked a crumb of cassata from Bea Peretz’s plate and ate it. “Not bad, if I do say so myself.”

Dukas looked whipped. “I ruined your dinner.”

Rose came around the table and kissed his balding head. “You didn’t ruin anything.” But Alan felt a chill, as if an unwanted future had put its hand on him. It was as if Bea’s daughter, growing older out of his sight, out of his awareness, had become the cause of the break. He thought of his own son, sleeping upstairs: was he, innocent, a kind of time bomb? He found himself thinking, Why can’t things just stay the same?

They all did the dishes and then poured out more wine, and Rose went to check on Bea and Mikey.

“I feel like shit,” Dukas said.

“Shut up about it, it wasn’t your fault.”

They were getting a little drunk, Alan decided. He’d better make coffee.

“I’ve put in for a transfer,” Dukas said. “I’m leaving, too.”

“Good God, why—you love NCIS,” Peretz said.

“It’s Al’s fault—he wrote me this letter. About Bosnia.” He looked accusingly at Alan. “You said they needed cops like me! Well, now they got one!” Now, almost apologetically, Dukas said, “I’ve volunteered for a war crimes unit. NCIS would have sent somebody anyway.”

Alan went to the kitchen to make coffee, shouting back to Dukas to talk loud so he could hear.

“I got no family, no kids, so what difference. Mainly I’ll put together this unit and try to go after some of these bastards.” He talked about the program he was joining, mostly a sop to the conscience of NATO. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Alan said, coming back. “You can’t save the world.”

“I can do something.”

“We were there six months, what did we do? We did Operation Deny Flight, did we save the old man who had his feet cut off? The guy who was tortured so badly he died of pneumonia? The UN set up enclaves, so-called safe zones, ‘safe havens,’ they’re where some of the worst fighting has been. Now they’ve signed a so-called ‘peace accord’ and divided Bosnia with a line like a snake’s intestine that makes ethnic cleansing permanent. It’s a rat’s nest. The Serbs aren’t the only assholes, either. Fucking Croatians are not exactly saints. The Bosnian Muslims are in bed with Iranian Intelligence. You can’t save them from themselves!”

Dukas was stubborn. “We have to do something.”

Peretz put on his skeptical face. “Who made us the moral guardians of the world, Mike?”

Dukas stuck out his lower lip. “We’re the most powerful nation on earth. It comes with the territory.”

“Maybe it comes with the territory to try. What doesn’t come with the territory is succeeding. It always works in sci-fi novels—you hover over the uncivilized planet and you say, ‘If you guys don’t stop the bullshit, the Moral Federation will squeeze your planet down to a bowling ball,’ and wham-bam, they all turn into good guys! Magic.”

Alan sighed. “Maybe that’s what we need—magic.”

“A magic weapon.”

“Interplanetary ballbuster.”

“Right. Meanwhile, we can’t keep one old man from getting his feet cut off.”

“Well—I gotta try, guys. I gotta try.” Dukas looked up, his eyes agonized. “You judge yourself by what you have the guts to do—not what it accomplishes in the big picture. If I stay here and do my job while all that shit goes on, I’m not a moral person.” He seemed embarrassed by using the word “moral.”

“A guy can get killed,” Alan said.

Dukas half-smiled. “I’m just so sick of shit. Like the Pollard shit. I want to—take a stand on something!”

Alan had a flash of the photo he’d found on the wall of the house in Pustarla. Colonel Zulu. He had been taking a stand. “Ever hear of the Battle of the Crows?” he said.

“What about it?”

“It happened six hundred years ago, and the Serbs lost. And it’s the biggest thing in their mystique—like the burning of Atlanta to the Daughters of the Confederacy. Those people have a long memory, Mike. Long passions.”

“Those people are insane,” O’Neill said.

“Some of ‘those people’ are Americans,” Alan said. He told them about the Chicago Bears ashtray in the house at Pustarla.

Dukas was taking out a little notebook and a pen. “There’s Americans all over that scene. No shit; I been reading the traffic. Fucking Croatians have a special-forces unit is two-thirds American—skinheads, Nazis, Aryan Nation, crazies—because they give them a historical link to Hitler, no shit.” He was making notes—Zulu, the ashtray, Pustarla. “Maybe it’s like the Pollard thing and it’s why I get so mad—people with two loyalties. You can’t have two loyalties; you got to decide. This mercenary, Soldier-of-Fortune shit sucks. You’re an American, you should act like an American, you don’t go someplace else and chop people’s feet off and rape little girls.” He was writing, talking to himself. “Maybe I’ll run into him, who knows? ‘Colonel Zulu at the Battle of the Crows.’ What an asshole.” He looked up as Rose came into the room, Bea a step behind her. His face broke into a smile when he saw Rose. “You light up the room, Babe.”

Bea was carrying a tray with a bottle of champagne and six glasses. Her eyes were red. “There’s six of us, nobody will get very much—it’s late—” She put the tray down. “But it’s a going-away.” She looked around at them. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

“Hey,” Dukas said. He went to her and put his arms around her. “Hey, me too.”

Rose poured the champagne into the tall tulip glasses. When she was done, she stood holding the bottle and looking down. “When we drink this—it’s kind of over, isn’t it. I think I’m gonna cry,” she said. She and Bea had an arm around each other’s waist.

“Don’t,” Dukas said.

“Harry’s going to Africa, and Mike’s going to Sarajevo, and I’m off to this new job, and in a few weeks Alan leaves the air wing—We’re all going—like pieces of paper, or something.”

“Except Bea and me,” Peretz said. “We’re not going anyplace.”

Alan took his wife’s hand. “We all volunteered.” He meant, It comes with the territory.

She sniffed and smiled and picked up a glass, and with eyes shining she raised her head. “Let’s look on the bright side! A year from now, we’ll be riding high! It will all have been swell, and everything will be great!” She sniffed again. “Somebody for Christ’s sake make a toast!”

Harry O’Neill stood. Alan and Dukas stood, and the six of them made a circle, their wineglasses almost touching in the middle. O’Neill said, “Good food—good wine—good friends.” He grinned. “I read it on a restaurant menu.”

“Friends,” they said together, and they drank. Then Rose did cry, and O’Neill looked across her head at Alan, his eyes wet, and Dukas sniffed.

Time seems to freeze, and he is able to look at them and to think but not to move, and he sees that they will never be like this again, not merely never so young again but never so comfortable; nor will life seem so easy. It is a turning-point, and what he senses but cannot put into words is that time brings trouble and pain, and it is coming to them. And, as if the effort to warn them causes time to run again, he moves, and the moment is shattered.

It is for such times that you keep a dog, because when it pushed its head into the circle and sneezed, everybody could laugh, and the mood was broken.

They wanted the others to stay the night in case they’d drunk too much, but people gulped coffee, and O’Neill said he had to get back and pack. He went out the door, drawing the others like leaves in the track of a car. Then Rose and Alan stood together in the driveway, watching them get into their cars and start them up, and they told each other they were okay. The tail-lights diminished down the street and disappeared, and they held each other in the warm darkness.

“We’re all going our separate ways,” Alan said. It saddened him. “You blink and everything’s changed.”

She pulled him closer and then rocked them both with her shoulder and hip, as if shaking him to make him forget such things. “How’d you like to take a horny helo pilot to bed?” she said.

“Girls get pregnant that way.”

“Yeah, I’d heard that.” She tipped her head back. “I sort of had it in mind.”

“Really?” He smiled back. Rose wanted six children, she said, a houseful; he thought three, max. They had only one.

“It works out just right if we’re quick.” Motherhood and a naval career could be made to mesh, she meant. “We might have to work at it all weekend.”

“You’re on.” They walked into the house with their arms around each other’s waist. Inside, the six empty glasses stood in a circle.

Part Two Turning the Wheel

4

June – July

After the dinner that was supposed to have been O’Neill’s farewell but that became before it was over a farewell for everybody, they all went their ways. O’Neill was the first to vanish, into what he called “the wilds of Africa.” Dukas was suddenly too busy to answer his telephone. Bea Peretz had a long talk with her daughter and took her away for a week at Disney World, where she turned out to be the daughter she’d always loved.

Even Rose went away. Her new duty station was in Columbia, Maryland, a “new town” originally beyond the Washington, DC sprawl and now part of it, a suburb that was like stepping into some mediocre planner’s dream of about 1960, a small town the way a nature walk is nature. It was too far from Little Creek for her to commute, and so while Alan finished his tour with the air wing, Rose got herself a furnished apartment and tried to cover her lack of a home life with work. That was Rose’s solution to all problems—work.

Left to himself, Alan put their house on the market and got to know his son again. He drove around, too, getting his land eyes back, as he thought of it—learning that the world was not only gray p’ways and crowded rack rooms, and not only young people in blue and khaki, but that it had both the very old and the very young, the slovenly and the neat, the male and the gloriously, non-militarily female. The “boyz in the hood” look had really taken hold while he was away; every male under thirty and a lot of females, black and white, seemed to be wearing baggy pants and oversize T-shirts. He loved it. It was so different from the boat he wanted to sing and often did, just driving around with the radio on, singing and whacking his hands in time on the steering wheel.

In a little while, he would go to the new job at the Pentagon. He and Rose had agreed that they would take their time finding a new place to live, somewhere between his new post and hers. When he drew a circle on a map that touched Columbia and the Pentagon, the center was out there somewhere in Maryland. He figured it couldn’t be worse than Little Creek. Still, he wondered what it was like to live where you really wanted to.

She came home on weekends, and after several of them she said she was pretty sure she was pregnant. Mikey, Alan, and the dog were all delirious to have her around. He asked her if she felt like a queen and she said no, after all it was only what she deserved.

They saw Mike Dukas a couple of times before he went to Bosnia. Alan saw him in Washington when he was going back and forth between his old duty and the new, as well. Mike was rushing around, learning a little Serbo-Croat to go with his Greek, getting outfitted by the marines in something approaching combat gear, getting briefings at State and DIA. He was pumped. Alan felt the nipping of envy, morosely aware that he was heading into three years of briefing admirals and putting together dailies. It was a good career move, but it wasn’t action. He told Dukas so at their last meeting.

“You’re a fucking action junkie!” Dukas said to him. They were wolfing down crabcakes. “Where’d you get it from? Life isn’t a goddam comic book, Al!”

“I’m not an action junkie!”

“You’re an addict. An adrenaline-rush addict.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’ve seen you!”

“Well, I’m going cold-turkey for three years, okay? And you, you Greek slob—!”

Dukas picked a bit of shell out of his teeth and put it on his plate. He leaned his round head toward Alan and growled, “I don’t want action! I just want to do some good!”

The next week, he was gone.

O’Neill was apparently in Africa, but Alan didn’t hear from him.

He had almost three weeks’ leave, but when his leave time was up and he went back to the air wing, it was a ghost. There was a lot of cleaning-up to do, old reports and pubs and general crap, but the life was out of it. He haunted the offices for a few days, thought of reporting to his new job early, resisted that (already leery of it, flinching from it) and volunteered to fill in at Atlantic Fleet Headquarters to keep himself from going bats in an empty office.

It gave him several days on a different point of the great wheel. He was sent to the intel sections where they were planning the next battle group’s pre-deployment “fleet exercise,” called officially Atlantic Fleet Battle Group Exercise 3–96, known now to everybody in the place as Fleetex. It was an interesting point to intersect the next BG, he found—looking at it not from the point of view of somebody on the carrier, but of somebody one step away from the strategic thinking of the Joint Chiefs.

Fleetex 3–96 existed then as an idea, expressed in a two-inch-thick, ring-bound planning book, five subordinate planning guides, and a rapidly increasing roomful of transparencies, viewgraphs, computer projections, maps, and graphics. He worked on one detail, and one that tickled him: figuring aircraft fuel consumption for eight dispersed supply points, of which one was to be a deep-draft, ocean-going oiler whose skipper was already designated in one of the pubs—Captain John H. Parsills, who, as a then commander, had been the first squadron skipper under whom he had ever served.

Wow! Skipper Parsills on an oiler! Here was the great wheel in one of its odder turns. Between being commander of a squadron and the captain of a carrier, a new 0–6 had to have experience as a deep-draft-vessel skipper, and the battle group’s oiler was often that ship. Fifteen years in the air, three years in the water!

Alan smiled. He didn’t even mind totting up fuel-consumption projections. Parsills had been a great guy, perhaps the finest CO he’d ever known. Helping him out, even on paper, was good.

Fleetex 3–96 was like a vast war game, with real ships and real aircraft for counters. It could best be understood by placing its master transparency, BG3/96-LL1, over its wide-view map (Exhibit 5). The map showed the Western Atlantic down to part of the Caribbean and north to the Carolinas. The transparency showed the Mediterranean, from Tripoli, Libya, north to the Adriatic and Venice. You put the transparency over the map, lined up the registration points, and saw the game scenario: Libya’s Gulf of Sidra thus became a bay in the outer Bahamas; Gibraltar was a spot in the northern waters, Bosnia both somewhere out in the Atlantic and, for hands-on bombing, the island of Vieques south of Puerto Rico. Reference to one of the planning books would reveal that a Canadian frigate and a British destroyer were to play opposing (Orange, read “Libyan”) forces, along with four smaller Bahamian gunboats, out of Nassau. (Nice duty, he thought.) Opposing-force air strikes would come from Marine Corps and Navy F/A-18s at Cherry Point, Beaufort, and Jax, with refueling by USAF KC-10s, mostly reserves, flying from East Coast bases. The focus of two of the three phases of the exercise was a point in the Bay of Sidra that looked, to Alan, dangerously close to Libyan territorial waters. Designated merely “Alpha,” it had on at least one viewgraph a ship’s symbol. Without going through the stack of binders, he could see that what Fleetex 3–96 was going to mock up was some sort of provocative action involving a US or NATO vessel in Libya’s Gulf.

This was not merely a game. You didn’t get that specific in a game.

It looked to him to be an interesting undertaking—“interesting” understood to mean dangerous, with serious international implications. Not to mention military: the Fleetex Phase One and Phase Two were scripted to stage an event at Point Alpha while running opposing-force actions against the battle group from two directions, which might as well be understood as Libya and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia? With a wild card thrown in for good measure, representing either other Islamic nations in the region or somebody with the ability to do force projection in the southern Mediterranean. Meaning, it’s going to piss a lot of people off!

On his third day at his desk in a big room full of desks, somebody suddenly shouted, “Flag officer on deck!” and Alan, like everybody else, jumped to his feet and braced. Moments later, a remarkably tall man came in with an urgency that carried him to the center of the room before he even looked around. He was trailed by a captain, two commanders, and a smarmy-looking jg with chicken guts on his shoulder—somebody’s nephew who had got staff duty instead of a destroyer. Flag puke, as his friend Rafehausen used to call them—not the ones who had earned their way there, but the ones who were doing it on Daddy’s nickel.

The admiral stared around him and then made for the big table where the master chart was. While he was turned away, the guy at the desk next to Alan’s mouthed “BG” to him, and then something that Alan figured out as “Newman,” the name of BG 7’s admiral. It was The Man himself.

Admiral Newman leaned over the big chart. He must have been six-six, Alan thought, towering over everybody else, a rather gangly man who looked somehow untidy even in a spotless uniform. He had tough eyes and a not very forgiving jaw, and as he leaned over the chart, Alan could see him in profile. He was not looking at a happy man, he thought. And he was right.

“Where’s the nuclear sub?” Admiral Newman said in a raspy voice.

Somebody said that was being handled over uh there, and they all walked over there, and a female jg started to explain that Libya had diesel subs and so they were working on the scenario that—

“I want a nuclear sub in the opposing force. Victor II. Do it.” But he may have said the last words to one of the O-5s with him, although the jg staffer almost wet himself trying to show how willing he was to do it if only somebody would explain what a Victor II was. Alan looked at the guy next to him and winked.

The admiral took an 0–6 by the elbow (either his flag captain or his chief of staff, Alan guessed) and came to the center of the room and said in a low voice, as if he thought they couldn’t be overheard, “—gotta have more Soviet-style Orange forces; these guys don’t get it. This is not acceptable!” Then he strode out.

The room relaxed. Everybody seemed to think this was a pretty funny scene. The guy next to him said, “Oh, he does that about once a month. He wants to fight Commies!”

A couple of days later, Alan went back to the air wing offices and began to wind up his affairs. A week later, he was to report to the Pentagon. The experience with Fleetex remained as an interesting sideways look at the wheel, at least until he discovered what Rose’s role would be in what was to happen at that dot in the Gulf of Sidra designated Point Alpha.

Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.

The Dar chief had a very fine job and thought he was a very fine fellow, one successful in an admirable line of work. He was clearly not so convinced of O’Neill’s worth, although willing to give him a little time before a final judgment, probably negative, was made. His name was John Prior, inevitably called Jack; he was white (hence not Black Jack); he had got as high as he would ever get in the Agency but didn’t yet know it. Fiftyish, lean, furrowed, he looked as if he might have a second career in modeling low-end fishing and hunting underwear.

“I understand you didn’t want to come here,” he said.

“Not exactly—”

Prior went right on. “Lots of people think they don’t want to come here. It’s stupid. You go where Uncle needs you, right? Well.” Prior had a very pleasant corner office in the embassy, with an American receptionist sitting outside (also Agency, minimally trained but capable). He had a good house and a fine car, and he lived in clear—that is, no assumed identity. O’Neill would not live in clear, at least some of the time.

“Locals’ll get on to you but not tight, you know? They live and let live, so long’s we share a little and pass some bucks along. That’s my bailiwick, dig? Don’t get into it. Leave it to me. They won’t hassle you much. How good’s your Swahili?”

“Excellent.” O’Neill had done a six-week immersion course.

“Bullshit.” Prior’s Swahili was terrible, therefore everybody’s must be. “Don’t get smart and try to go native or something. Black guys confuse them. Give yourself a year to fit in. Hey?”

“Well, I’ve looked at the files—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He shoved a pile of folders across his desk. “These are Requests for Information from DC. I’ve tagged five of them for my attention. You get six and seven; they’re softballs, so you can learn on them.” He stared at O’Neill. “Don’t recruit anybody until I say so. The word is ‘Go slow.’”

“I would have thought—”

“Don’t think yet. Go slow on that, too. Your predecessor tried to set the world on fire and all that caught was his own pants. I had to get him out of the country before the whole place went up. This is a country where we got things working good for us. I don’t want it screwed up.”

The whole western fringe, O’Neill knew, was in turmoil because of things that were going on in Rwanda and Zaire; there was a neo-Marxist, anti-Mobutu group of Zaireans that had been living in Tanzania for a decade and were supposed to be getting ready to invade their own country; Tanzanian military forces were supposed to be lining up behind them. This was to be ignored?

“Kabila and the Zairean Tutsis—” O’Neill started to say.

“You keep out of that. I’ve got that under control. I want you to focus on the economy. Secondary focus, trans-shipment of drugs from southern Asia.”

“My predecessor had some good contacts in Rwanda.”

“MacPherson inherited some contacts in Rwanda, and he blew them. They’re gone! He was an asshole, I told you. Let it lie.” Prior tried to stare him down, and O’Neill let him. His new boss, after all. “Rwanda is another country,” Prior said, his voice deep with significance.

“‘And besides, the wench is dead,’” O’Neill said. He smiled. Get it? No, you don’t get it. Oh, shit. But he was saved, because Prior didn’t listen to what was said to him by subordinates unless he had asked a direct question.

“Repeat, Rwanda is not in your domain.”

“You don’t want me to even try to contact them?”

“I want you to work with what you got. You got two good clusters of econ-intel contacts that MacPherson didn’t screw up; just stay with them. There’s a couple of business guys that I met socially I’m passing on to you; I want you to bring them along. Thank God, you strike me as the kind of guy might get along here if he behaves himself—you dress well, you talk well, you look okay.”

Okay? There was a compliment for you.

“You play tennis?” Prior said.

“Of course.”

Prior glanced at him. Prior, he guessed, had not grown up in such a way that “of course” he played tennis. “You got a doubles date tomorrow with Amanda and one of the business guys I told you about.” Amanda was the receptionist. “I was supposed to go but I’m going to say I’m suddenly down with a turned ankle and you’re taking my place. If you can beat them, do it; the guy’ll be impressed. He’s in the blue folder.”

“How real is my cover job?” O’Neill said.

Prior snickered. It was a beginner’s question. “Your job is being a case officer. Period.” So much for being the Deputy Attaché for Trade.

O’Neill hugged the folders to his chest and started down the corridor toward his temporary office. Go slow, read the RFIs, and play tennis. It wasn’t quite like being James Bond.

The Pentagon.

Alan Craik walked down the long, long corridor, past a stand of flags and a wall of framed photographs of admirals, past door after door after door. It was early; a hundred, a thousand other men and women were also walking this corridor and all the other corridors exactly like it in the concentric pentagons that gave the building its name. Now and again, through an open door, he could see right through to windows that gave on the vast inner courtyard, and, across it—over the trees, the walks, the tables—other windows, other walls.

He held his attaché case with his orders tight against his right side. His morning coffee burned in his throat. Christ, I’m all tensed up, he thought. Why? This is going to be a piece of cake. Tense because he had already persuaded himself he was going to hate it, he knew. All during that mostly sleepless night, he had told himself not to pre-judge it. Don’t anticipate. Be ready to be pleasantly surprised. Try to love it. If you don’t like your job, there’s something wrong with you, not the job.

He found the right door at last and turned his orders over to a yeoman, and eventually he was led to an office where a woman full commander with a pleasant face shook his hand and said Welcome aboard and Boy are we glad you’re here! We’re three slots short!

She took him around, introduced him. Sketched the roughest outline of the job—reading nine sets of dailies, compiling, writing five summaries, editing, briefing. A big smile. “Could you run a classified package out to the Agency for us? Got a courier pass? You get one up on four—Jackson’ll tell you how. Get it there before lunch, okay?” Big smile.

He had hardly settled behind a desk he was told was his (he was not sure; there was a brassiere in one otherwise empty drawer) when a woman in civilian clothes leaned in his cubicle door. “Hi. I’m Jan—I’m a plans editor. Not why I’m here. Subject: your turn to make the coffee.” Big smile. “Your turn started two minutes ago and the natives are getting restless.”

Not exactly James Bond.

IVI.

Suter had been away at the major contractor’s in Texas, and after that Touhey had had him trotting around congressional offices in Washington, so he hadn’t been at the Columbia location for almost two weeks. He was getting the feel of the job and the place, and he almost wished he had come there directly instead of by way of the Agency; the place had an enormous feeling of things happening, of energy. He found that he admired Touhey, even while his allegiance was to Shreed. Of course, that could change. But it was early days for any of that; for now, he was back, getting to know the offices, some of the people, getting to understand the complexities of the compartmentalization that kept Peacemaker’s secret-weapon function utterly separate from its public, intelligence function.

He had found early on why Han had rushed him through sub-level two. There were, in a limited-access lab, mockups of the modules that latched to Peacemaker’s main unit. Most people in the know referred to the main unit itself as Peacemaker, the modules as “the intel pack” and “the weapon.” Officially, these three were called the Low-Orbit Maneuverable Satellite, or LOMS; the Acquisition and Radiation Module, or ARM; and the Direct Application Module, DAM. Everybody agreed that the weapon module should somehow have had the ARM acronym, but that wasn’t the way it had worked out. Actually, DAM sounded not too shabby as the nickname of a weapon.

Part of the design problem of Peacemaker was Touhey’s requirement that ARM and DAM attach to the LOMS in exactly the same way and have exactly the same shell. Visually, it would be difficult to tell one from the other; the observer would have to get close enough to read the legends on the latches. Touhey had planned way ahead. What he wanted—and got—was a device whose artist’s renderings could go direct to the media without compromising its real nature. That was where they were now, releasing generalized pretty pictures and PR sweet talk, visiting pet congressmen (they were all men) and handing out information packets. They’d made the evening news as a “ground-breaking short-term satellite to plug holes in America’s surveillance grid.” Meanwhile, at a minor contractor in Indiana, the DAM module was being built in drop-dead secrecy.

Suter spent twenty minutes with Touhey, reviewing some of George Shreed’s questions about the project, and then he went up to the cafeteria for coffee. He tried to be seen up there, to get them accustomed to him as a real member of the team. As usual, the big, windowed space had young people dressed like athletes at most of the tables. Suter looked them over, thought they weren’t very interesting, then snapped his eyes back to a woman he didn’t recognize, who had been turned away. She was dark, shapely, truly pretty. Eye candy, he found himself thinking. She was sitting by the window so that the outside glare made him slit his eyes to see her. Nice.

He walked toward her, pretending to look for a place to sit and covertly looking at her again. Really nice. He was going to walk right up to her and ask to sit at her table because everything else was full (although it wasn’t) when somebody called, “Hey, Suter!”

It was Han. Suter smiled. It paid to stay on Han’s good side, he had found. People liked Han, God knows why.

“Hey, Colonel.” Suter sat down where he could look at the woman.

Han grinned. “This is a side of you I didn’t anticipate,” he said.

“Sir?”

Han grinned some more. “If your tongue hangs out any farther, you’re going to wet your tie. She’s married.”

“Who?”

Han laughed. Suter, he said, was something else.

Suter glanced at the woman. Married. Oh, well—so what?

Sarajevo.

Mike Dukas was standing by a window in the newly painted office of Sarajevo’s Associate Deputy Chief of Police for NATO Liaison. New office, new title, new man. The guy was a Bosnian Muslim, a desk cop, doing what he did best—managing information. In this case, he was briefing Dukas.

Dukas had been in Sarajevo for twenty-two hours. He was still groggy from jet lag and he didn’t have an office of his own yet. He was looking down into the courtyard of a small apartment building next door and wondering what the long heaps of earth like graves were.

When the Associate Deputy Chief shut up to take a breath, Dukas said, “What are those?” He pointed down. “The things that look like graves?”

The Bosnian hesitated a moment, then suddenly became human. “Those are graves,” he said quietly.

Dukas looked at him—disbelief, questioning.

Entirely human now, the Bosnian cop gave him a sad smile. “We couldn’t get to the cemeteries because of the bombardments. The snipers. We buried the dead where we found room. I buried my mother in her rose bushes.”

Welcome to Sarajevo.

5

July

IVI.

Her name was Rose Siciliano, and she was a lieutenant-commander in the Navy. Suter was amused by that, because when he’d seen her Friday, she’d been wearing blue jeans and a Redskins T-shirt. The clothes had meant she probably worked on Upper Level 2, where the whiz-kids played and things had low security classifications. Suter had been surprised to learn that in fact she worked on S1, the first underground level, where security classifications were high and Peacemaker got a lot of its work done. But the S1 location meant she knew Peacemaker only as an intelligence satellite and was walled off from DAM.

He had been back a total of nine hours, four of those spent with a lot of boring crap about British real estate in the South Atlantic that might make potential test targets for Peacemaker, and more spent with the general and some with Han, and he’d still found time to ask about the woman he’d seen at the cafeteria window. He’d thought about her at home, thought about her on the drive in.

She was the just-designated Seaborne Launch Officer. Her arrival signaled Peacemaker’s move from mockup to launchable prototype.

He managed to catch her in the cafeteria by making three trips there his second morning back. He was supposed to be reading targeting pubs, getting up to speed on the flashiest way of using Peacemaker. He was a speed reader, very good and very smart, if he did say so himself; he could spare the time to chase this wonderful-looking woman. And, the third time was the charm: there she was, in the same chair by the window. This time she was wearing a dress and looking like a businesswoman. Even more terrific.

“Mind if I join you?” he said. “I’m Ray Suter.”

She sort of smiled, but also looked a little pained.

“I’m a little lost, and I could use some sympathy. I’m new here.”

“Sure, sit.”

She was not an easy piece of work. Her eyes were amused by him, not charmed. She also had an innate toughness that surprised him; it hadn’t been evident on Friday. Maybe it had been the T-shirt, the suggestion of somebody young and naive.

“I thought you were one of the computer kids,” he said, trying to sound like a man who was embarrassed by some small stupidity. “I noticed you Friday.”

“Friday’s Casual Day in my place,” she said. “Today we’re just regular people. I gotta go.” She was on her feet, tossing her Styrofoam cup into a plastic receptacle.

“I’ll see you again,” he said. He stood.

“Probably.” She looked him up and down, still not charmed. A very tough woman inside that softness. But she smiled. “It’s a small place,” she said.

That afternoon, he called up her personnel file on his computer. He could do that because of Shreed’s influence with Touhey. He had access to everything. Almost the first thing he saw on her file was that she was married to Alan Craik.

His first response was that it was a real kick in the ass. The second was that something might be made of it. After all, taking Craik’s wife to bed would be killing two birds with one stone.

But it would take time. Well, he had time. Launch was still five months away.

IVI.

Rose loved the work at IVI. She was surprised. Desk jobs were usually a pain in the ass, something to be got through because the detailer said it was good for your career, but this one was both exciting and demanding. Two or three days a week, she was on the road, either visiting the contractors or hitting offices in the Navy department. She was going to be launch officer on a ship, and she didn’t know zip about ships, except what you had to know to land a chopper on one. More visits, more reading. She set herself up for a week’s cruise on a survey ship of the kind they would be using.

Alan was living in a short-term rental house in Falls Church, with Mikey and the dog. He hadn’t sold the Norfolk house yet and fussed about it—somewhat childishly, she thought. She missed him, but when the chance came to go to Houston to watch a missile launch from Mission Control, she went and lost a weekend with him. And Mikey. And the dog. She was pregnant but made little of it yet. In a few months, she told herself. When, at an IVI planning meeting, Touhey had talked about moving the test launch date up, she had found herself regretting the pregnancy. What if she had to take childbirth leave and they brought in somebody else and that’s when the launch went? Then, guiltily, she scolded herself. Where are your priorities?

East Africa.

O’Neill was getting the hang of it pretty well. Prior had told him so. Prior was fairly generous with compliments, actually, applying some version of the pop psychology the Agency rented from its consultants—” Motivate Your Subordinates,” “Catch More Flies with Sugar,” “The Four Steps to Excellence.” Or was it five? Or three? Mostly, what he said was, “God, at least you’re better than MacPherson!”

MacPherson fucked every female agent he could get close to and some of the men, I really believe it, Prior had told him. He had no more idea of how to behave than my golden lab. And the files and the stories around the embassy showed that, indeed, MacPherson had been one of God’s great fuckups, a possibly unique creation. Worst of all, he had let sex come into everything, which was not morally wrong but was, in O’Neill’s view, a mistake because sex was too powerful to use; it ended up using you. He would never make that mistake, he was sure.

O’Neill had a tiny house on the mountain slope outside Arusha, but he was seldom there. He also had an office in Arusha, but he was seldom there, either. The office ran itself, thanks to three female in-country employees who were vetted yearly out of Dar. Mostly, O’Neill was on the road, touting the wonders of capitalism and making contacts, but really driving, driving the roads to work out surveillance routes and trying to apply the lessons of the Ranch. The lessons were a bad joke in Africa, having been designed for cities and developed countries, the Ranch’s idea of the terrain of espionage being the shopping center and the parking garage and the supermarket. Now, O’Neill drove hundreds of miles, trying to establish routes from here to—where? That tree? This village without a telephone? That abandoned cement factory? This overgrown sisal field?

Thus, the Rotary Clubs and the Chambers of Commerce and above all the colleges and schools became major waypoints. His excuse for going there was his canned pep talk on Africa and the Free Market Economy. He thought of it as the Flea Market Economy but didn’t say so. He was a good speaker, and educated Africans in particular took to him because he reminded them either of their own days on an American campus or their days in England. English education was still the ideal, and Cambridge O levels, although abandoned in England, were revered here, and O’Neill, with his good clothes and his manners and his cultured voice, was very like those African academics who were more British than the British. They wore dark suits and had morning and afternoon tea in the Common Room, brought round by tea ladies pushing metal tea carts. Like academics everywhere, these were suckers for flattery and money, and the two in combination got him a lot of likely recruits. The trouble was, would they know anything worth squat or would they just want to spout off?

Mostly, they were merely excuses for trying to lay out detailed routes.

He had a five-year-old Toyota LandCruiser. Most of his travel was in the north and east of the country, where the modern economic activity was, but he made reasons to go west to the shore of Lake Tanganyika and up to Bikuba, where there were signs of military presence, because he knew that Rwanda was going to be big, no matter how cautious Prior was. He was also going nuts from the frustration of doing nothing important. On weekends, he came back to Arusha and sat in his nearly empty house. He wrote letters to Alan Craik full of up-to-date, inside stuff and sent them in the diplomatic bag. He reviewed the old files left by his woeful predecessor and the far better man before him, Hammer, who had set up the networks that MacPherson trashed.

He knew that there should be survivors out there who could be wooed back. To get the files, he had to drive to Dar, sign the files out, drive them to Arusha, read them, and drive them back and sign them in before his workday started on Monday. When he pointed out that the files could be sent via e-mail because Tanzania had no means of monitoring transmission, Prior told him that the official Agency position was that e-mail is not secure.

O’Neill selected what he saw as Hammer’s best three agents in Rwanda.

When he next went west, he left a sign at three places, and then he waited.

One agent was dead. One was terrified, living under a new name in Zambia. The third would respond.

6

August

IVI.

Rose had stopped going to the cafeteria for morning coffee because there was too much to do. Or that was what she said—and believed. An outsider might have said she had found work to fill that time. An outsider might have said she liked to boast of never having a minute, even for the cafeteria.

Suter stopped by sometimes. Rose found she rather liked him. She knew he was coming on to her. Many men did. So?

“At it again,” he said, leaning in her office door. “Got a minute?” He always had some excuse for visiting her. She didn’t discourage him. She learned stuff from him. And was flattered by the attention. Suter was a good-looking guy. Unlike Alan, however, he was aware of it. Vain.

“Half a minute,” she said. “I’m swamped.”

He had learned to bring his own coffee. Hers was terrible, made by some Seaman Apprentice first thing in the morning and left to cook down to its acidic worst all day. He told her some bit of detail about adjustments in the launch angle and said, “So you want to be an astronaut.”

“Sure do.” She was writing notes to herself about the launch angles.

“Ride the Vomit Comet? Join the Team of Heroes?”

“You got it.”

“I might be able to help you there.” She looked up. Her face was expressionless and did not give him the encouragement he wanted. “I know some people in the program.”

“I like to make it on my own,” she said.

“That’s not how it works.”

“That why you left the Navy?”

He had never mentioned his Navy career to her. It irritated him that she knew something like that without his having told her. “How’d you know that?” he said.

“My husband.”

Of course! That shithead Craik had told her all about him. He could picture the letters Craik had written home from the boat, full of self-pity and bitterness. He felt better. “I can imagine what he said about me,” Suter said with a smile.

“Really?” She had been writing, finished, looked up. “Actually, he didn’t say anything. I was the one who mentioned your name, and he put two and two together and guessed you were his old boss.”

“And then what’d he say about me?”

“Nothing.” She seemed surprised that he’d ask.

Well, of course he couldn’t believe that. Craik must have given her an earful. That was okay; bad press was better than no press. Maybe she found her husband just a bit of a shithead, too? “At least you mentioned my name to him,” he said with a grin.

“Valdez!” she shouted. She had a hell of a voice when she needed it; Suter resisted jumping out of his chair at her sudden bellow. Somebody had passed behind him out in the corridor. What the hell? he thought. A male voice behind him said, “Yeah,” and Rose called over and through Suter, “Show me how to acquire the Orbit Adjustment file out of White Sands, will you? I keep getting some message saying I’m committing an illegal act and I get closed down. It hurts my feelings.”

“Yeah, ma’am, I told you twice already.” He came in, a compact, dark, near-teenager in blue jeans. “Hey, how ya doin’?” he said to Suter without looking at him. He went right to Rose’s computer.

“Valdez is my resident geek,” she said. The words had a final tone to them, as if she had said something like, Oh, look how late it’s getting, meaning it was time for Suter to go. She turned away from him and toward Valdez, who was leaning over her computer.

“Uh—” Suter was annoyed. He didn’t like being dismissed. He liked even less being dismissed in favor of a Latino kid who had barely finished high school. “Maybe I’ll stick around and learn something,” he said.

She gave him a dazzling smile. “Valdez is the smartest computer jock in LantFleet. He’s got Silicon Valley after him—don’t you, Billie?”

“They jus’ want me for my body,” the kid said. His head was close to hers over the keyboard. Suter saw that he had a tiny tattoo behind his ear. Suter hated him.

Late in the day, Rose and Valdez caught a flight out of BWI to Houston. She was starting to ride herd on the thousands of details that affected the ship and the launch hardware; from Houston, they would go to Newport News to pick up the civilian ship for her week’s orientation. Go and go and go.

It was not enough for Rose to be assured by somebody else that things were going well. She had to see it for herself. She had to see the drawings, the mockups, the prototype. That first launch was not going off without her understanding everything about it. Valdez went along because he was her personal computer whiz—requested by name from her old squadron, where she had learned almost everything she knew about computers from him.

“How come you know so much, anyway?” she said as they flew over West Virginia, for once not using the flight to press her nose against the screen of her laptop. This was not a sudden desire to relax; Valdez was showing signs of unhappiness, and if her computer geek was unhappy, she knew she was going to be unhappy somewhere down the line.

“I’m a genius.” He meant it as a joke, but it was literally true, if you went by IQ scores.

“You weren’t born a computer geek, Valdez.”

“No, ma’am, I was born a spic. I was goin’ to be a criminal mastermind, but Mister Carvarlho got to me first.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll ask—who was Mister Carvarlho?”

“We called him ‘Mister Horse,’ because caballo means horse. You say ‘Carvarlho’ fast, it sounds like caballo—horse, okay? I hated him. He was PR, half black, he always wore suits, he was a born-again Christian with an attitude.”

“Not your ideal.”

Valdez laughed. “My nightmare! That guy was the opposite of everything I was gonna be. I was a gangbanger at eleven; at twelve, I was carrying a gun. No kiddin’! I had this Rossi .38 special, nickel, real shiny—I thought I was cool. I shot it once—I’m runnin’ the street at two a.m., just for the hell of it I shot it. Blam! I only had five bullets, that’s what it held—like a Chief’s Special, right, only a Rossi?—it was light, nice, but a lotta recoil for a little kid. Anyway, I carried that; I had a place I put it outside the school, I’d leave it in the morning, pick it up as soon as I got out. I was bad.”

The Navy didn’t like people who had been ba-a-a-d, she thought. He must have got awfully good awfully quick. “You never got caught?”

Valdez hesitated. He was slumped down in his seat, his left knee and calf pressed against the back of the seat in front. He was frowning. “My dad caught me. Him and me didn’t get along then. My dad—” Valdez squirmed upright. “He was workin’ two jobs, sendin’ money home, didn’t speak English—I came in drunk one night, he was comin’ home from his night job—I’m twelve years old, remember—and the gun drops out on the floor. He just looks at it, and then he starts to cry. I thought he was a jerk. I di’n’t know, you know? I see it now—the guy was worn out, beat down. But Jeez, to be a hotshit gangbanger and see your old man cry—! I thought I was so cool, man.”

Valdez plucked at a little packet of salted peanuts that had been put in front of him. “You understand about bein’ Latino?” he said. “In Cleveland?”

“Probably not.”

Valdez sniffed, like a bull inhaling. “Couple days later, I’m walking down the hall in school—I’m in junior high, seventh grade through ten are all together—and this hand comes outa nowhere and grabs my shoulder. I was gonna deck the guy. Nobody touched me—tough guy, huh? That’s when I found Mister Horse was one strong born-again Christian. One hand, he held me, I couldn’t move. ‘Come in here, young man,’ he says. Whoosh! I’m in his room. He holds me like a frigging vise! When I’m quiet, he says, ‘You are the newest member of the Computer Club. Welcome to the Club.’ I think he’s loco—I think he’s lost something up under his hair. Later, I find him and my father are in a Bible-reading thing together. My father has told him about the gun. Mister Horse sits me down in front of my first computer and puts a joystick in my hand and he turns on a simulation game.

“I’m hooked.”

He chewed on his peanuts. He shrugged. “Couple months later, I was doing simple programming.”

“How’s your father now?” she said.

“He died.” Valdez chewed. “He took my gun, he threw it in the river. I hated him. Then he was dead, I understood him a little better. Too late. Sad story, huh?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Lotsa sad stories. World is full of sad stories. Let’s change the subject.” Valdez squirmed again, shot a glance at her. “I’m not real happy with this job,” he said.

That was a surprise. A shock, in fact. “It’s a great job!” she said.

“Great for you, maybe.” He shook his head. “They’re not giving me stuff.”

“Who?”

“Them. Whoever.” He waved a hand. “In computers, what difference is who? Difference is what, Commander. Lemme put it in Navy: ‘Insufficient data are being provided to Petty Officer Valdez.’ See? No who.”

“Insufficient data about what?”

“If I knew that, I’d have the data, woul’n’t I? What I mean is, there’s too much code for the stream I’m getting.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell. That’s like me asking you how you can tell a chopper is loaded wrong from the way it flies. I can tell.”

She was already protective of Peacemaker. “You don’t have a need to know,” she said primly.

“Bullshit I don’t have a need to know! You think I’m gonna trust my work on a system where I’m closed out of part of the data stream? I might as well ask for a transfer right now.”

“Valdez!” She sat upright, turned on him. “What’s this ‘transfer’ crap?”

“I might do it.” He looked like a stubborn child. “I believe in freedom of information.”

“This is the goddam US military, and information is classified, not free!”

He rolled his head toward her. He had large eyes the color of dark chocolate. “You know what MP3 is?” he said.

“Are you changing the subject on me, Valdez?”

He shook his head. “MP3 is the way you download music and play it through your computer so you listen to what you want, when you want—no CDs, no albums, no nothing decided for you by somebody else. That’s freedom of information. You know what open source code is? Same kinda thing. I believe in those things. I also believe in the US Navy, but if the Navy gonna put me in a position where I got to knuckle under to somebody else’s idea of what comes through my computer—” He made a horizontal chopping motion. “Finito, man.”

She was angry—she recognized that she was getting on top of the job because she was beginning to get angry about it more often, caring—but she controlled herself and said, almost but not quite flirting with him, “Valdez—you wouldn’t desert me, would you?”

But he wouldn’t look at her. The movie had come on and he was watching it without headphones. “You find out what’s bein’ kept from me,” he said.

Rose sat back, arms folded. Problems, problems.

On the flight to Newport News two days later, it was as if settling into the seats and snapping the seatbelts put them back where they had left off. Nothing had been said in the interim; in fact, they had hardly seen each other. But clearly, the earlier conversation had been somewhere on her mind, because the first thing she said after they took off was, “Can I ask you something personal?”

“Sure, why not?” He flashed her a grin, all teeth and big brown eyes. “Maybe I won’t answer, though.”

“What’s that tattoo behind your right ear?”

“Pachuco.”

“What’s that?”

He didn’t believe it. “You don’t know pachuco?” He laughed, made the face that means, This is fucking incredible! “You know Zoot Suit.” He said it as a fact, not a question.

She was laughing now—at herself, at both of them. “What’s Zoot Suit? I’m sorry, Billie—”

“You don’ know Zoot Suit? Edward James Olmos, man! Luis Valdez!” Now, he was pleading with her to know. Then it was too much; he threw himself back in his seat and gave up. “I’ll bring you the video.” He started to take out his earphones, then turned to her again. “I saw Zoot Suit when I was a little kid. Another kid put the pachuco mark behind my ear; most guys got it on their hand, here, between the fingers so it doesn’t show. Then I did him. We weren’t gangbangers yet; we were being cool, big-time, but—It meant something to us! Zoot suits!” He shook his head. “It was a Latino thing. I kind of gave it all up when I went to Jesus, but, you know, it’s part of me, man.”

“Are you a born-again now?”

He folded his arms and stared at the seatback. “Yeah, and yeah, and finally no. I been to Jesus so many times I get frequent-flyer miles. You not laughin’? That’s one of my best lines, Commander; guys always laugh, ’cause it’s cool.” He slouched lower. He was a small man and the seat fit him. “Jesus got me out of the gangs and He got me through high school and into computers, but I couldn’t take church. Jesus, si, His people, no way, Jose. So, Jesus and me got our own church.” He looked at her, his head now lower than hers. “Okay?”

“Your mom and dad disappointed?”

“Yeah. Big-time. But after my old man died, my mom, she kind of toned it down. Maybe one day she’ll go back to the priests, I think—one of those little old ladies in a black shawl, goin’ to mass every mornin’. She believed the pentecostals because he did, I guess.”

“How did he die?” Rose asked gently.

“Fell off a scaffolding. Tired out.” That was enough of that; he wriggled upright. “Hey, did you find out what I ast you?”

“About the data stream?” She shook her head. She was a little embarrassed; the truth was, she didn’t understand the question well enough to ask it.

“Okay, I tell you how we goin’ to get the information. The Peacemaker electronics bein’ done on the cheap—off-the-shelf. That’s fine; there’s good stuff out there. But what it means is, someplace there’s a contract for all the software. You get that for me. Once I see all the software laid out, I know what’s goin’ on.” He pulled down his tray-table. “You want to keep your computer geek happy, remember, Commander.” He started to put on the earphones, then held them away for a moment. “You get me the list of software, I get you a video of Zoot Suit.”

Right. One more detail to take care of.

Washington.

At home in his rental apartment after Mikey went to bed, Alan had started “flying” a simulator on his PC. It was like a parody of the idea of going to flight school. It was a mockery of his desire to get out of his job. His old squadron friend Rafehausen had asked him to visit him at the War College at Newport, where he’d give him a real flying lesson, he said, and Alan had so far refused because he had had some dumb idea that by staying home he was being loyal to Rose. Or something.

One night, he crashed a Cessna three times in a row on the virtual ramp of his virtual aircraft carrier, and then he telephoned Rafe and said When should he come up? They made a date for it, and he told Rafe that he’d just learned that his board had deep-selected him for 0–4 for next year. It wasn’t like telling Rose, but she was on the road somewhere.

Off Hampton Roads.

The USNS ship Grace Orbis rolled in heavy swells and took enough water over the bows to splash against the bridge windows as if it had come from a monstrous bucket. Below, Rose and Valdez made their way along a narrow corridor whose steel bulkheads were studded with rivets, their path partly blocked by “knee-knockers,” those unmovable metal uprights—fire-hose connections, corners of lockers, sills of watertight doors—that put bruises on the shins of everybody before a voyage is over. The ship’s roll swayed Rose against a bulkhead and then out again, and she giggled. Ahead of her, Valdez was walking with his feet wide apart and his hands out at each side to keep himself off the bulkheads. He looked to her like a mechanical toy. She giggled again.

“Well,” she shouted over the storm, “you wanted a change!”

“Hey, man, this is too much like being a sailor!” he bellowed.

They were doing a quick familiarization cruise. She was air Navy; now she had to learn more about what the despised line officers did. The Grace Orbis was a much smaller ship than Philadelphia, the one that would launch Peacemaker, but Philadelphia was at Newport News being refitted for the launch. She figured that if she could stay upright aboard Grace Orbis, Philadelphia would be a cakewalk.

A ladder led up to a watertight hatch and the deck. To Valdez’s disgust, she wanted to see the storm close up. She gave him a shove. “Move it!”

Valdez started up. The bow rose and he swayed back and she thought he was going to come down on top of her; she put a hand in the middle of his back and pushed. The bow started down and he swayed to vertical again, and she started up after him. He was at the hatch, reaching for the big white handle, and she was halfway up the ladder when the ship made a more abrupt move to starboard, the bow going down and the deck swinging far over to her right. She started to make some sound to show she wasn’t scared, the sort of sound you might make on a roller-coaster, and then she felt Valdez sway back and down and into her, and her feet were going out from under her, sliding, and briefly she was airborne and then slamming against the metal rail. She slid down, banging her shins on the ladder, feeling a sharp, horrible pain in her gut and then hitting hard on the bottom step and bouncing once more to the steel deck below. Valdez was beside her in two jumps.

She thought I’ve hurt myself, and then almost at the same time, Don’t show it, don’t show it! and she was clutching his arm, feeling the bow come up, taking her with it, swaying; she clutched his arm and said, “I’m all right—I’m all right—” She clawed herself halfway upright. The pain flashed down her abdomen and into her thighs and she thought she would fall again, and she held on to his arm with both hands, staring into his brown eyes so she wouldn’t pass out. “I’m really all right—!”

“Oh, Jesus,” he was moaning, “oh, help us, Jesus—!”

“Get me up straight—I’ve got to stand up straight—I’m all right, I’m all right—!”

7

August

East Africa.

O’Neill sits beside Lake Victoria. He is waiting for her—the female agent who responded to his sign.

O’Neill is at peace, perhaps for the first time. He has found he likes Africa. He understands now what Craik meant about its size, about its smell, the look of it. He has no feeling of coming home; to the contrary, it is the most alien place he has ever been. Yet it brings him peace.

She will wear green, and if something is wrong she will also wear a red scarf. This is not the sort of tradecraft they taught him at the Ranch, but Ranch tradecraft is not designed for Africa in the 1990s; it is designed for Europe in the 1970s. He smiles to himself. The wonder of it is that any of what they taught him actually does work here. The cops-and-robbers of counter-surveillance, for example. Most of the psychology of recruitment. It is like being a Boy Scout and finding that what the Boy Scout Manual says about building a fire really does make flame, even if nobody in his right mind would ever make it that way.

Perhaps, when he goes back, he will teach about Africa at the Ranch.

He sees a green dress coming toward him. It is still far away, but he can see the swing of her, her size, and he can see that she does not wear a red scarf.

O’Neill rises and goes to meet his future.

Which is Alan Craik’s future.

Near Newport, Rhode Island.

“You’re over-controlling.” Rafe’s voice was calm, devoid of criticism, an LSO voice.

Alan eased up on the stick, flexed his hand, and tried to keep the little gauge that measured rate of climb centered on zero through the turn. The single-engine plane wobbled slightly, very like a horse that knows it has a novice at the reins.

“See the runway?” The question seemed superfluous—the ancient runway of Quonsett Reserve Naval Air Station almost seemed to fill the viewscreen. “Center up. Ease up on the stick. The plane will fly just fine without you.”

Rafe spoke to the tower one more time, but Alan’s entire concentration was on the airplane and the runway. The runway, which had seemed miles long a moment before, now seemed to flow beneath him at the speed of light.

“Throttle down.” Rafe seemed to be running a checklist. Alan looked at his flaps and saw they were at full. His momentary glance broke his concentration on the stick, and the plane wobbled. He corrected automatically and was delighted to find that he had recentered. The plane dropped lightly; the altimeter ran slowly down toward zero, and the plane touched, less than a third of the way down the runway. Alan wanted to shriek with joy, but Rafe smiled wickedly and said, “Full power.”

Alan reacted automatically, running the throttle to full before the speed fell below thirty knots.

“Touch and go. Flaps up.” Alan ran the flaps all the way up with one hand, trying to watch the airspeed while keeping the plane centered on the runway. The airspeed needle passed through fifty-five knots and he pulled back lightly on the stick. His eyes flickered to the rate of climb; he was trying to hold on five degrees, with reasonable success. The plane began to climb away. Rafe spoke to the tower again and turned to Alan. “Nice job. You might have a stick hand, at that. Now ascend to 5500 and turn on course 172 for Naragansett. We’ll land there for lunch.”

The plane was Rafe’s. He kept it at Quonsett while he attended the War College. As a senior 0–4 with no kids and a busted marriage that so far hadn’t cost him alimony, he could maintain the sleek Cessna 182 in top condition and decorate the dash with gauges that were meaningless to Alan.

“You landing on the altimeter?” he asked casually, fiddling with the pocket on his windbreaker.

“Is that wrong?”

“Unfortunately, it just broke.” Rafe grinned and taped a piece of cardboard—he had been planning this, the sonofabitch—over the altimeter dial. “You liked flying with me off the boat, you get to learn my way.”

Rafe’s way was unnerving. Alan watched the ground, then started to glue himself to the angle-of-climb monitor. The airfield was down there, visible, and Alan was well into the approach, yet he felt lost. He kept waggling the wings to get a better view of the ground, and once, he almost panicked when he saw that he was in a 15degree descent instead of being level, but he fought the machine and himself and at last achieved lineup with the runway.

“How’s Rose?” Rafe asked.

Alan took a deep breath. “Rose was pregnant,” he said. “She lost the baby.”

He watched the runway and made a minute correction.

“Never try to correct so close to the ground!” Rafe shouted, and the wheels touched. He modulated his voice. “Nice landing, Buddy.”

“She fell down a ladder during sea trials on her new project.” Alan was thinking of Rose, the pale face on the hospital sheets, the limp hand in his, the averted face. No tears. Rose.

“Fucking A, Alan, that sucks.” With the engine at idle and no slipstream, the utter honesty of Rafe’s comment struck him. That was how it had been at the squadron. Confrontation, joy, sorrow—all right there. Not a lot of bullshit. “She taking it out on you?”

Two nights before, he had tried to make Rose talk about it and he still saw her gesture—hands raised on each side of her head, fingers spread, blocking out sound, sight, him; her voice, I’ll deal with it! Just let me deal with it! The hands, the voice shutting him out—

It was Rafe’s turn to try to smile, wryly now. “You don’t hide things very good, Spy.” He unbuckled his harness. “Get a hundred hours’ real time and you can solo in my plane. You’ll be a good pilot. Just stop paying such close attention to everything.”

Words to live by. Just stop paying such close attention. Right.

Houston.

Rose tears down the corridor and out a fire door, banging the handle with both palms to get it out of her way. The rental car waits in the parking lot and she almost runs to it. Drive as fast as she dares to the airport, dump the car; run to the check-in, only ten minutes to spare, slam down the ticket, run for the departure lounge—

If only I can stay busy. If only I can move fast enough. If only—

Work is a drug. She hates the evenings and the nights. Evenings, there isn’t always enough work to keep her mind from going back to it. Nights, there is never enough sleep, always the waking, the thinking, the pacing around the house or the hotel room. It is better on the road, because there is no Alan beside her there to remind her of what they have lost. Because of her. Because of going too hard, trying too hard, wanting too hard—

It was her fault. Not Valdez’s fault. Valdez had fallen on her, but that was because she had been hurrying him up on deck. Trying too hard. Going too fast. Her fault.

Now, so as not to remember, she tries to go faster. Cursing the people ahead of her in the aisle of the plane, the ones who left their overhead crap until the last moment, the ones who have to chat up the flight attendant, the ones who can’t walk fast enough. She hurries around them, almost running toward the terminal, toward the new rental car, the new offices. If she can only go fast enough—

Late that night, she calls Alan, as she does every night. She feels exhausted but doubts she will sleep. She hopes she has enough paperwork to last until tomorrow. She keeps her voice light, nonetheless. She must succeed in making everything seem okay, because he talks of other things: His job bores him. He has had lunch with Abe Peretz. He has heard nothing from O’Neill or Dukas; he is worried about them. What are they doing?

She tries to enter into his concern. Maybe it will get her through the night. What are O’Neill and Dukas doing? What are O’Neill and Dukas … ? All she can think about is the baby and the accident, and she turns on the light and begins to memorize the launch-parameter codes for Peacemaker.

8

August

East Africa.

Harry O’Neill had made a mistake.

In fact, he had made the biggest mistake a case officer can make.

He had fallen in love.

With one of his agents.

All case officers, it is said, sleep with their agents—surely an exaggeration—but they don’t fall in love. It is the falling in love that is the mistake.

And he knew it was a mistake, and he was happy. He was happier than he had ever been in his life, happy in a way that reconciled him to his father’s snobbery and his ex-wife’s nastiness, to his own self-doubt and to the dangers of his mistake. If his life ended tomorrow, he told himself, he would say it had been worth it.

“I love you,” he said to her. “You make me happy.”

Elizabeth Momparu looked at him. Her eyes were slightly swollen from sex and sleep and fatigue, and when she half-closed them to look at him, they seemed to turn up at the corners. She had a fair idea of how she looked to him but no notion of how she really looked to him—the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most enchanting woman in the world. She had had a lot of men, white and black. Some of them had said they loved her. She had thought she had loved three. She had never known one like Harry.

“I like being with you,” she said. “I like being safe with you.”

They were sitting on the terrace of a game lodge in eastern Kenya. Night was almost there, coming fast; the retreating day had left a reddish light that made everything—waterhole, thorn trees, sky—seem like an old color slide that had lost all its blue and green. In front of them was a low wall, and a dropoff of twenty feet to an artificial waterhole that would be floodlighted later. For now, only rock hyraxes the size of gray squirrels were there, scrambling up over the wall and taking crumbs from the tourists. It was a safe place, she was right; O’Neill had looked for a long time before he had picked it. None of the Hutu Interahamwe would ever come there.

“Why don’t we get married, and you can feel that way all the time?”

“Harry—!”

He smiled, shrugged, as a man who has asked the question before will shrug. He would go on asking it, too. One day, as they both knew, she would say yes. He touched her fingers, and she twined hers into his.

The reason it is the worst of mistakes for a case officer to fall in love with an agent is that he endangers his very reason for being when he does so. An agent, cut it how you will, is expendable, but a lover is not. At the same time, the agent is rarely unique, is more likely part of a network. When the case officer wants to fold the agent into his real life, he destroys both of them, and often the rest of the network, too.

O’Neill knew these things. He was thinking of them as he sat in the near-dark and seemed to watch the hyraxes. He had already decided that he didn’t care, at least not about the theoretical part—his job, his career, the Agency. He did care about disentangling her from her role as agent.

“I don’t want you to go back,” he said.

She squeezed his fingers. “I have to.”

“I want you to fly to Paris. I’ve made a reservation for you.”

“Oh, Harry—”

“You’ll be safe. Somebody will meet you.”

She was silent for so long, she seemed to have forgotten. “You know I can’t,” she said at last.

He knew she wouldn’t go. He had to do it, had to make the arrangements, as if she would. Maybe she would. But of course she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t for the reason—one of the reasons—that he loved her: because she wanted to stop the killing. She had first allowed Hammer to recruit her because once she knew what he was doing, she thought that helping the Americans would bring their power and what she saw as their idealism into it. The Americans would stop the killing, she had thought. But the Americans hadn’t stopped the killing, as it turned out.

“I have to go back there,” she said. “You know you need me there. Six months, then maybe—”

“I’ll get somebody else.” He knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t. She was close to the leadership; he’d never find anybody so close, with all the turmoil. It would take years to replace her. That would be somebody else’s problem.

“Maybe,” she said, “things will change next year.”

Things wouldn’t change in a hundred years. They both knew that. But it was what people told themselves all over central Africa: maybe things will change. Meanwhile, the uneasy truce in Rwanda had become a preparation for war in Zaire, using the refugees there as a weapon. O’Neill had agents in Uganda and eastern Tanzania and Zambia now, and they all said the same thing: a splinter Zairean group in Tanzania was going to be supported in a takeover of Zaire. The other nations would all profit, grabbing slices of territory—buffer zones, minerals. The Hutu refugees were a kind of shield for all sides, behind which the Interahamwe sheltered and the potential invaders hid their intentions.

“What if I quit my job and we went home?” he said. Home was the States. She had been there on a holiday—Disney World—but she couldn’t think of it as home.

“You’re being silly. People like us don’t have a home. Nobody in my country has a home any more. We’re all refugees, even me, and I own a villa. You made yourself a refugee when you took your horrible job.”

“I’m an expat, not a refugee.”

“Yes, you’re American. Americans can’t be refugees, can they. They own the world.”

“I told you, I’ll quit the horrible job.”

“No, you won’t.”

They sat another twenty minutes. By then, it was black dark. Lights had been turned on in the trees below them, but no animals had come to the waterhole yet. They stood to go in to dinner. When she was facing him, close to him, she said, “I—” and stopped. She wasn’t looking into his face, rather down into the trees.

“What?”

She had a habit of pushing out her lower lip and pushing her tongue up against her lower teeth when she was challenged, getting an expression faintly like a chimpanzee’s. She shook her head. “We’ll talk about it later.”

She ate greedily. She was a big woman and she liked to eat. She did many things greedily—making love, talking, shopping—and he loved her for it because the greed extended to him.

The place was laid out with winding paths that ran along the curved front of the single-story buildings that housed the guest rooms. At night, guards were available to take guests to their rooms because animals came in from the bush, seldom anything more dangerous than a baboon, although a baboon can kill a child, maim a grown man. Elizabeth was afraid of neither the dark nor the animals, and she strode along, the low lights with shades like conical hats shining on her ankles, leading Harry by the hand as if it were he who needed her protection. Once in their room, however, she became tentative. She stood with her blouse partly unbuttoned, as if lost in some idea. Then she moved to the closet, took the blouse off, hung it up, and turned back—and stood there. When he put his arms around her she moved away, said, “No. Not yet.”

She continued to undress slowly. Wearing bra and thong panties, she took a cigarette from her purse and stood looking at it. He had been astonished that she smoked; he still didn’t much care for the taste of cigarettes on her. In Africa, everybody smoked.

“I want to tell you something,” she said.

He thought he had heard all her revelations. The ones about other men had been hard on him. He had shucked off a lot of immature bullshit, coming to grips with them, coming to realize that love in this case required accepting whatever had gone before. It had taken him weeks to come to it. Along the way, always, was the possibility of AIDS. He had coped with that, too.

“Is this place really secure?” she said. She had been tapping the cigarette, tapping it and tapping it, and at last she struck the lighter he had given her and put it to the end. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.” He had scoped the room and made sure it was clean. Kenyan security were not on to him. They would sometime, but just now he was not of interest to them. She was on a false passport he had got from the embassy and not interesting to them. They were secure.

She strode up and down. She was nervous, more nervous than he had ever seen her. After several minutes, she turned on her little radio, stubbed out the cigarette and took out another. When it was alight, she said, “I want to tell you something I haven’t been able to tell anybody else.”

Harry O’Neill prepared himself.

She sat on the bed and took his hand and drew him down next to her. They were both big, both mostly naked. She said, “I have something I didn’t give you. Business, you know.” Business meant in her capacity as agent. Harry felt immense relief. Not another lover, then. She swallowed noisily and smoked and said, “I couldn’t tell the guy before you. And Hammer—”

Hammer had been in his forties, overweight, and he had driven his Range Rover down to Ruaha in the rainy season, and they had found him after he’d been missing for two days. The vehicle had got stuck in a vast mudhole and he’d had a heart attack.

“Hammer died two years ago. I had this—something to tell him—but I couldn’t for a while; it was the bad time, the really bad time, you couldn’t travel and there were killings everywhere and everybody on the move, and—By the time I thought it was safe to send a signal, he was dead. Then that idiot came in and I couldn’t trust him.” She looked at him. “I just couldn’t trust him, Harry!”

Their bare shoulders and arms and thighs were pressed together, but O’Neill knew that he was supposed to sit and listen. This was one of those times when love and sex didn’t go hand in hand.

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