Читать книгу Peacemaker - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 8

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?