“Vietnam?” she asked after a few moments, temporizing, trying to add more substance to a very muddled collection of thoughts.
“That’s right.” Kelly paused. He had to explain it, just a little, to help her understand. “There are some people over there who won’t get back unless we do something, and I am part of it.”
“But why do you have to go?”
“Why me? It has to be somebody, and I’m the one they asked. Why do you do the things you do, Sandy? I asked that before, remember?”
“Damn you, John! I’ve started to care about you,” she blurted out.
The pain returned to his face one more time. “Don’t. You might get hurt again, and I wouldn’t want that.” Which was exactly the wrong thing for him to say. “People who get attached to me get hurt, Sandy.”
Sarah came in just then, leading Doris into the kitchen, for the moment saving both of them from themselves. The girl was transformed. Her eyes were animated now. Sandy had trimmed her hair and found decent clothes for her. She was still weak, but moving under her own power now. Her soft brown eyes fixed on Kelly.
“You’re him,” she said quietly.
“I guess I am. How are you?”
She smiled. “I’m going home soon. Daddy—Daddy wants me back.”
“I’m sure he does, ma’am,” Kelly said. She was so different from the victim he’d seen only a few weeks before. Maybe it did all mean something.
The same thought came into Sandy’s mind just then. Doris was the innocent one, the real victim of forces that had descended on her, and but for Kelly, she would be dead. Nothing else could have saved her. Other deaths had been necessary, but—but what?
“So maybe it was Eddie,” Piaggi said. “I told him to sniff around and he says he doesn’t have anything.”
“And nothing’s happened since you talked to him. Everything’s back to normal, like,” Henry replied, telling Anthony Piaggi what he already knew and following with a conclusion that he had also considered. “What if he was just trying to shake things up a little? What if he just wanted to be more important, Tony?”
“Possible.”
Which led to the next question: “How much you want to bet that if Eddie takes a little trip, nothing else happens?”
“You think he’s making a move?”
“You got anything else that makes sense?”
“Anything happens to Eddie, there could be trouble. I don’t think I can—”
“Let me handle it? 1 have a way that’ll work just fine.”
“Tell me about it,” Piaggi said. Two minutes later he nodded approval.
“Why did you come here?” Sandy asked while she and Kelly cleaned up the dinner table. Sarah took Doris back upstairs for more rest.
“I wanted to see how she was doing.” But that was a lie, and not an especially good one.
“It’s lonely, isn’t it?” Kelly took a long time to answer.
“Yeah.” She’d forced him to face something. Being alone was not the sort of life he wanted to have, but fate and his own nature had forced it on him. Every time he’d reached out, something terrible had happened. Vengeance against those who had made his life into what it now was did make for a purpose, but it wasn’t enough to fill the void they’d created. And now it was clear that what he was doing, all of it, was merely distancing him from someone else. How did life get so complicated as this?
“I can’t say it’s okay, John. I wish I could. Saving Doris was a fine thing, but not through killing people. There is supposed to be another way—”
“—and if there isn’t, then what?”
“Let me finish?” Sandy asked quietly.
“Sorry.”
She touched his hand. “Please be careful.”
“I usually am, Sandy. Honest.”
“What you’re doing, what you’re going off to, it’s not—”
He smiled. “No, it’s a real job. Official stuff and everything.”
“Two weeks?”
“If it goes according to plan, yes.”
“Will it?”
“Sometimes it actually does.”
Her hand squeezed his. “John, please, think it over. Please? Try to find another way. Let it go. Let it stop. You saved Doris. That’s a wonderful thing. Maybe with what you’ve learned you can save the others without—without any more killing?”
“I’ll try.” He couldn’t say no to that, not with the warmth of her hand on his, and Kelly’s trap was that his word, once given, could not be taken back. “Anyway, I have other things to worry about now.” Which was true.
“How will I know, John—I mean—”
“About me?” He was surprised she would even want to know.
“John, you can’t just leave me not knowing.”
Kelly thought for a moment, pulled a pen from his coat, and wrote down a phone number. “This goes to a guy—an admiral named James Greer. He’ll know, Sandy.”
“Please be careful.” Her grip and her eyes were desperate now.
“I will. I promise. I’m good at this, okay?”
So was Tim. She didn’t have to say it. Her eyes did, and Kelly understood how cruel it could be to leave anyone behind.
“I have to go now, Sandy.”
“Just make sure you come back.”
“I will. Promise.” But the words sounded empty, even to him. Kelly wanted to kiss her but couldn’t. He moved away from the table, feeling her hand still on his. She was a tall woman, and very strong and brave, but she’d been hurt badly before, and it frightened Kelly that he might bring yet more pain to her life. “See you in a couple weeks. Say goodbye to Sarah and Doris for me, okay?”
“Yes.” She followed him towards the front door. “John, when you get back, let it stop.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said without turning, because he was afraid to look at her again. “I will.”
Kelly opened the door. It was dark outside now, and he’d have to hustle to get to Quantico on time. He could hear her behind him, hear her breathing. Two women in his life, one taken by an accident, one by murder, and now perhaps a third whom he was driving away all by himself.
“John?” She hadn’t let go of his hand, and he had to turn back despite his fear.
“Yes, Sandy?” “Come back.”
He touched her face again, and kissed her hand, and drew away. She watched him walk to the Volkswagen and drive off.
Even now, she thought. Even now he’s trying to protect me.
Is it enough? Can I stop now? But what was “enough”?
“Think it through,” he said aloud. “What do you know that others can use?”
It was quite a lot, really. Billy had told him much, perhaps a sufficient amount. The drugs were processed on one of those wrecked ships. He had Henry’s name, and Burt’s. He knew a senior narcotics officer was in Henry’s employ. Could the police take that and spin it into a case firm enough to put them all behind bars for drug trafficking and murder? Might Henry get a death sentence? And if the answer to every question was yes, was that good enough?
As much as Sandy’s misgivings, his association with the Marines had brought the same questions to the front of his mind. What would they think if they knew that they were associating with a murderer? Would they see it that way or would they be sympathetic to his point of view?
“The bags stink,” Billy had said. “Like dead bodies, like the stuff they use.”
What the hell did that mean? Kelly wondered, going through town one last time. He saw police cars operating. They couldn’t all be driven by corrupt cops, could they?
“Shit,” Kelly snarled at the traffic. “Clear your mind, sailor. There’s a job waiting, a real job.”
But that had said it all. BOXWOOD GREEN was a real job, and the realization came as clear and bright as the headlights of approaching cars. If someone like Sandy didn’t understand—it was one thing to do it alone, just with your own thoughts and rage and loneliness, but when others saw and knew, even p
eople who liked you, and knew exactly what it was all about.... When even they asked you to stop....
Where was right? Where was wrong? Where was the line between them? It was easy on the highway. Some crew painted the lines, and you had to stay in the proper lane, but in real life it wasn’t so clear.
Forty minutes later he was on I-495, the Washington Beltway. What was more important, killing Henry or getting those other women out of there?
Another forty and he was across the river into Virginia. Seeing Doris—what a dumb name—alive, after the first time when she’d been almost as dead as Rick. The more he thought about it, the better that seemed.
BOXWOOD GREEN wasn’t about killing the enemy. It was about rescuing people.
He turned south on Interstate 95, and a final forty-five or so delivered him to Quantico. It was eleven-thirty when he drove into the training site.
“Glad you made it,” Marty Young observed sourly. He was dressed in utilities for once instead of his khaki shirt.
Kelly looked hard into the General’s eyes. “Sir, I’ve had a bad enough night. Be a pal and stow it, all right?”
Young took it like the man he was. “Mr. Clark, you sound like you’re ready.”
“That isn’t what it’s about, sir. Those guys in SENDER GREEN are ready.”
“Fair enough, tough guy.”
“Can I leave the car here?”
“With all these clunkers?”
Kelly paused, but the decision came quickly enough. “I think it’s served its purpose. Junk it with the rest of ’em.”
“Come on, the bus is down the hill a ways.”
Kelly collected his personal gear and carried them to the staff car. The same corporal was driving as he sat in the back with the Marine aviator who wouldn’t be going.
“What do you think, Clark?”
“Sir, I think we have a really good chance.”
“You know, I wish just once, just one goddamned time, we could say, yeah, this one’s going to work.”
“Was it ever that way for you?” Kelly asked.
“No,” Young admitted. “But you don’t stop wishing.”
“How was England, Peter?”
“Pretty nice. It rained in Paris, though. Brussels was pretty decent, my first time there,” Henderson said.
Their apartments were only two blocks apart, comfortable places in Georgetown built during the late thirties to accommodate the influx of bureaucrats serving a growing government. Built of solid cinder-arch construction, they were more structurally sound than more recent buildings. Hicks had a two-bedroom unit, which compensated for the smallish living-dining room.
“So what’s happening that you wanted to tell me about?” the Senate aide asked, still recovering from jet lag.
“We’re invading the North again,” the White House aide answered.
“What? Hey, 1 was at the peace talks, okay? I observed some of the chitchat. Things are moving along. The other side just caved in on a big one.”
“Well, you can kiss that goodbye for a while,” Hicks said morosely. On the coffee table was a plastic bag of marijuana, and he started putting a smoke together.
“You should lay off that shit, Wally.”
“Doesn’t give me a hangover like beer does. Shit, Peter, what’s the difference?”
“The difference is your fucking security clearance!” Henderson said pointedly.
“Like that matters? Peter, they don’t listen. You talk and talk and talk to them, and they just don’t listen.” Hicks lit up and took a long pull. “I’m going to leave soon anyway. Dad wants me to come and join the family business. Maybe after I make a few mill’, maybe then somebody’ll listen once in a while.”
“You shouldn’t let it get to you, Wally. It takes time. Everything takes time. You think we can fix things overnight?”
“I don’t think we can fix things at all! You know what this all is? It’s like Sophocles. We have our fatal flaw, and they have their fatal flaw, and when the fucking deus comes ex the fucking machina, the deus is going to be a cloud of ICBMs, and it’s all going to be over, Peter. Just like we thought a few years ago up in New Hampshire.” It wasn’t Hicks’s first smoke of the evening, Henderson realized. Intoxication always made his friend morose.
“Wally, tell me what the problem is.”
“There’s supposedly this camp ... ” Hicks began, his eyes down, not looking at his friend at all now as he related what he knew.
“That is bad news.”
“They think there’s a bunch of people there, but it’s just supposition. We only know about one. What if we’re fucking over the peace talks for one guy, Peter?”
“Put that damned thing out,” Henderson said, sipping his beer. He just didn’t like the smell of the stuff.
“No.” Wally took another big hit.
“When is it going?”
“Not sure. Roger didn’t say exactly.”
“Wally, you have to stay with it. We need people like you in the system. Sometimes they will listen.”
Hicks looked up. “When will that be, do you think?”
“What if this mission fails? What if it turns out that you’re right? Roger will listen to you then, and Henry listens to Roger, doesn’t he?”
“Well, yeah, sometimes.”
What a remarkable chance this was, Henderson thought.
The chartered bus drove to Andrews Air Force Base, duplicating, Kelly saw, more than half of his drive. There was a new C-141 on the ramp, painted white on the top and gray on the bottom, its strobe lights already rotating. The Marines got out of the bus, finding Maxwell and Greer waiting for them.
“Good luck.” Greer said to each man.
“Good hunting,” was what Dutch Maxwell told them.
Built to hold more than double their number, the Lockheed Starlifter was outfitted for litter patients, with a total of eighty beds bolted to the side of the aircraft and room for twenty or so attendants. That gave every Marine a place to lie down and sleep, plus room for all the prisoners they expected to rescue. The time of night made it easy for everyone, and the Starlifter started turning engines as soon as the cargo hatch was shut.
“Jesus, I hope this works,” Maxwell said, watching the aircraft taxi into the darkness.
“You’ve trained them well, Admiral,” Bob Ritter observed. “When do we go out?”
“Three days, Bob,” James Greer answered. “Got your calendar clear?”
“For this? You bet.”
26
Transit
A new aircraft, the Starlifter was also a disappointingly slow one. Its cruising speed was a mere 478 miles per hour, and their first stop was Elmendorf Air Force base in Alaska, 3,350 miles and eight hours away. It never ceased to amaze Kelly that the shortest distance to any place on Earth was a curve, but that was because he was used to flat maps, and the world was a sphere. The great-circle route from Washington to Danang would actually have taken them over Siberia, and that, the navigator said, just wouldn’t do. By the time of their arrival at Elmendorf, the Marines were up and rested. They departed the aircraft to look at snow on not-so-distant mountains, having only a few hours before left a place where heat and humidity were in a daily race for 100. But here in Alaska they found mosquitoes sufficiently large that a few might have carried one of their number off. Most took the opportunity to jog a couple of miles, to the amusement of the Air Force personnel, who typically had little contact with Marines. Servicing the C-141 took a programmed time of two and a quarter hours. After refueling and one minor instrument replacement, the Marines were just as happy to reboard the aircraft for the second leg of the journey, for Yokota, in Japan. Three hours after that, Kelly walked onto the flight deck, growing bored with the noise and confinement.
“What’s that over there?” he asked. In the distant haze was a brown-green line that denoted somebody’s coast.
“Russia. They have us on radar right now.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Kelly observed. br />
“It’s a small world, sir, and they own a big hunk of it.”
“You talk to them—air-traffic control, like?”
“No.” The navigator laughed. “They’re not real neighborly. We talk on HF to Tokyo for this leg, and after Yokota, we’re controlled through Manila. Is the ride smooth enough?”
“No beefs so far. Gets long, though.”
“It does that,” the navigator acknowledged, turning back to his instruments.
Kelly walked back into the cargo area. The C-141 was noisy, a constant high-frequency whine from the engines and the air through which they were passing. The Air Force didn’t waste any money, as airlines did, on sound insulation. Every Marine was wearing earplugs, which made conversation difficult, and after a time didn’t really block the noise anyway. The worst part of air travel was the boredom, Kelly thought, made worse by the sound-induced isolation. You could only sleep so much. Some of the men were honing knives which they would never really use, but it gave you something to do, and a warrior had to have a knife for some reason. Others were doing push-ups on the metal cargo deck of the aircraft. The Air Force crewmen watched impassively, not wanting to laugh, wondering what this obviously select group of Marines was up to, but unable to ask. It was for them just one more mystery as their aircraft slid down the Siberian coast. They were used to it, but to a man they wished the Marines well on whatever their job was.
The problem was the first thing on his mind when his eyes opened. What do I do about this? Henderson asked himself crossly.
It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but what he would be able to do. He’d delivered information before. At first unknowingly, through contacts in the peace movement, he’d—well, not so much given over information as had joined in rambling discussions which over time had become more and more pointed until finally one of his friends had asked something just a little too directed to be a random inquiry. A friendly question she’d asked, and at a very friendly moment, but the look in her eyes was a little too interested in the reply and not enough interested in him, a situation which had immediately reversed when he’d answered the question. A spoonful of sugar, he’d told himself later, rather vexed with himself that he’d fallen prey to such an obvious and old-fashioned-well, not an error, really. He liked her, believed as she did in the way the world should be, and if anything he was annoyed that she’d felt it necessary to manipulate his body in order to get something that reason and intellect would have elicited quite readily from his mind ... well, probably.