A God In Ruins

“Dozens. I had to learn to play ball or starve. My daddy’s Little League team, the John Deere Tractors, won one state and two local championships.”

Quinn debated with himself as he came to the verge of doing something really stupid.

“You still need fixing,” she said.

“I was afraid you were going to discharge me. Greer, you scare the hell out of me.”

“And you make me hot,” she said.

“Nobody from Grand Junction gets hot.”

Quinn’s apartment was a very desirable two-bedroom flat, but it didn’t brag. It was startlingly tidy, jammed with books and filled with touches.

“That’s Mal’s bedroom at the end of the hall.”

“Hmmm.”

“His daughter comes in often. When she does, she sleeps on the air mattress in the living room.” Nice. It was covered with an embroidered bushkashee spread, and every place was inundated with fuzzy and leather pillows.

“You could use a few mirrors. We can’t have an alcove without mirrors. Hark, what’s this? Madame Butterfly, La BohemeT she said, thumbing through his LPs.

“My buddy, Carlos Martinez, taught me this.” “Mozart, Glenn Miller, Satch. Neat, but no Beatles?”

“The beginning of the end of music in this century.”

“I hate to say it, but I agree. Between the frantic tribal ritual and the pot and an obvious lunatic shrieking at you; hey man, maybe you and I are not tribal. Had many girls here?”

“I’ve got them marked off and graded on a calendar somewhere. I’ll see if I can find it.”

“I want something serious to drink,” she said.

“I keep a few bottles for the priests.” He opened the cabinet. Ah,

here was something to shiver her timbers. Lemon Hart, a Polish paint remover sold as liquor. Plunk, plunk and some grenadine so she wouldn’t have heart failure. Greer, cowboy style, said, “Here’s lookin’ at you, pardner.”

Her eyes widened as she tore to the sink and filled herself with water.

“You son of a bitch!”

“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, taking a nip of the Lemon Hart and purring, “Ahhh, smooth!”

She threw her arms about him. “Oh, boy, you’re fun. You should have seen that hairy Iranian left tackle I had to do a bio on.”

“Best seat is on the mattress,” Quinn said. “It’s also the safest. I don’t make passes. I just put on my Sunday best manners and wait to be invited.”

Greer flopped on her back and stretched in every direction as he fixed her a sweet, humane gin and tonic. “I feel wonderful. You got a rich daddy?”

bo-so.

Quinn fixed some of the little pillows around his back to full comfort. Greer sat up, tried her new drink, then tucked her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms about them.

“So, where do you go from here?” she asked.

“Into my senior year. I’m a Maldonado junkie for sure. Aside from his class he does a semi-private ethics course with four students. He has a great way of explaining the human condition in relationship to civilization and Eros. And you?”

“Me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just a skinny ole gal from Junction on a pit stop en route to New York. I’m going to the top in the media. I’m going to be a boss, a giant. I was born with all kinds of wigglies driving this little engine. Maybe Professor Maldonado can explain them to me next semester.”

“You try to shock people with your jock talk. What are you covering up?”

“Ninety-eight pounds and a lot of other wigglies, horny ones. Next year is my dirty year. I’ve read every book and seen every porno flick I can get my hands on. Let me say, I do not exactly come chaste. Unfortunately, there have always been cowboys practicing roping and branding. Anyhow, there was enough of an appetizer in it to tell me good things are ahead.”

“Well, lucky guy.”

“Could be you,” she said.

“Include me out,” Quinn replied.

“Uh-uh. Every day a new day and a new way. We’ll buy out all the candles in Boulder, incense, mirror the nooks, clothing fit for a whore, tattoos. I’m having a one-year blowout before I go conquer New York.”

“You’re really a friggin’ nutcase,” Quinn said.

She flung her arms about him. “I know! And I know something else.

You’ve got a thing for that Maldonado chick.”

“Come on, stupid. She’s only sixteen years old.”

“But oh, my. You ought to see her watching a ball game.”

“Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

The “I’ll call you” macho talk didn’t last long. Quinn was annoyed that Greer didn’t show up for practices and a game where he hit three doubles, one to each field.

He caught a glimpse of her in the deli in the company of a tank-topped beanpole crowned with a bush of hair that could give shade to a regiment. He was the star of the basketball team. It occurred to him that an animal like Greer was the ultimate colorblind woman; in fact, she might just pursue her curiosity. Quinn always ended his sermons to himself with, she ain’t nothing but misery.

The ball club played a respectable .500 season. Quinn O’Connell became a .294 spray hitter, moved from eighth to second in the lineup.

As a matter of fact, the professional A-team out of Bakers* *

field tried to woo him for the summer. Coach Boy held his breath and put on his hound dog look.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Quinn told him. “I owe my dad a big summer’s work, and I want to get reacquainted with the ranch.”

“You coming back for a senior year?”

“Funny. Professor Maldonado lives down the road from me, but I’ve got to come to Boulder to hear his lectures. I kind of think I’ll be back.”

“The skinny broad?” Coach Boy grunted.

It hit! Quinn shrugged. “Her game is just a game. Big mouth trying to cover little boobs.”

“They called it cock teasing when I was a young man,” Boy said.

The conversation ended with Quinn holding a pair of trembling hands down by his sides.

He saw her alone again cuddled in a chair in the reading room of the Norlin Library.

“Howdy, pardner.”

“Oh, hi there. Sit down, it’s public.”

“I was hoping you’d see what your student did in the last three games.”

“I saw you. You hit nine-for-fifteen against the best pitchers Missouri and Kansas had. God, if Colorado had one more pitcher.”

“Why haven’t I seen you, Greer?”

“Same reason I haven’t seen you. I felt so good and open with you, I guess I went over the edge. I painted you a picture of a tawdry whore, and actually, all I want to be next year is a tawdry whore. I thought it could be kind of crazy with us but.. .”

“What?”

“What! Hey, Quinn, you got it all going for you with that handsome, steady, skilled silence and you ain’t Elmer Fudd, not with the titles on your bookshelf. You’ve got a few dozen girlie tricks up your sleeve, but you’re just not as loud about it as I am.”

“Movies, Friday night?”

“Why don’t we pass?” she said.

“Are you ashamed of yourself or something like that?” he asked.

“Feel silly.”

“Christ, woman, I envy you from head to toe. The way life bursts out of you and puts bright colors on everything around you,” Quinn said.

“You stealing that from some poet?” she replied.

“Movies, then?”

“No.”

Quinn gnashed his teeth to head off in some different direction. He was trying to decide which. A frustrated fist on the table brought “shhh” and “ahem” from around the library. His squealing chair brought the required raised eyebrows from the librarian.

“Look,” Quinn said, speaking softly and smiling to those seated nearby.

“See, I know how to talk barely above a whisper. Let’s go outside.”

She pouted a moment. He loved to see her pout. “Okay,” she said.

They found a place on the library steps. From there the campus was guarded by a picket of mountaintops on the other side of the Great Divide. Many were old white-headed boys gushing their winter snow, soon to fill the down slopes with great mountain daisies.

“Is it me?” Quinn asked. “Is it me—Quinn O’Connell’s personality or belching habits or nose picking that puts you off? Just say, “I don’t like you, Quinn,” and I’ll split.”

“No, it’s me,” she said. “I threw you all that raw meat, and you’ve called my bluff.”

“Hey, Greer, baby .. .”

“Quinn, I’m not in my right mind about you, and I know what I know and what I know is that once I put my hands on you, we’re going to go for the championship.”

“We can start slowly,” he said. “Lots of weekends to know each other up at the ranch.”

“Dammit! I don’t want to go to the ranch with you. I don’t want to fall helplessly in love with you. Nothing is going to keep me from going to New York.”

“Well, can’t I visit?”

“Quinn baby, I’ve got a ten-week internship with a producer director at Crowder Media in New York. If you’re there, it won’t be fair to me.”

Quinn digested it grudgingly. Her whole life had been geared to this opportunity. As a couple in Manhattan they could barely learn the bridges and tunnels in ten weeks. She was on a sacred mission. Quinn? Going nowhere, doing nothing. Since the trip East with his mother, Quinn had a mountain of second thoughts about that human blizzard called Manhattan, but he could see Greer relishing it, all right. Not himself.

“You plan to come back to Colorado?” he asked.

“Scenario one, yes. Scenario two, no. Maybe I’ll forget you, maybe I won’t. Maybe New York is going to grab me.”

“You’re gone,” he whispered.

“Quinn, maybe you don’t know how desperately I’m holding myself together at this moment. I want you, man, but I can’t stay home the rest of my life and bake cookies.” She thought. She had been thinking of it. The time had come.

“I’ll make you a deal. I swear I’ll come back from New York and take my next year in Colorado and live with you. Then we go our separate ways.”

“Why come back?” he asked, a bit acidly.

“Twenty years from now I don’t want to curse myself for passing this over.”

“Sounds a little Faustian to me. How free can we be knowing there is a time clock ticking away?”

“If it’s not for you, Quinn, I don’t come back. I’d go to NYU. God

knows, a TV station might want me—no, wait, don’t butt in. Even if I

get the scholarships and even if I see myself advancing, I’ll come back because I’ll know I can make it there. I’m not afraid of swapping my place in line for a year with you.”

He pulled her up to standing, and they walked tightly together. She cuddled so close he felt better than at any moment he could remember. “How about us making love tonight?”

“Oh, God!” she cried. “Don’t dangle wisps of paradise over me, driving me back to Colorado before my time.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I was trying not to be fair. Baby, when I think of you, I just forget to remember what I was supposed to be thinking of. It’s more powerful than anything I’ve known,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“I’ll be at the airport to meet you on Labor Day.”

It was the summer of great hurting and healing. Dan tried to hold his feelings of fear and urgency and to take their lives back ten years when peace and love prevailed.

Quinn realized how much it ran against Dan’s Marine Corps grain to take this path of compassion and was glad for it. They had a fine time together, the best, a retreat to Langara Lodge up on the Canadian-Alaskan border, where the salmon were an honest yard long.

Quinn read a lot and hung out with Maldonado, always coming out brighter than when he went in. Mal didn’t preach, he just spoke and a twisted U-turn in one’s brain suddenly straightened out.

Rita whipped through her seventeenth birthday looking twenty and feeling ridiculous with some of the pimple-faced young men she was dating. Quinn was a man! A man in his twenties! Her spirits dropped when she considered her chances.

In the first two weeks of vacation, the phone lines burned up between

the Village in New York and Troublesome Mesa. These times were

difficult for Quinn because Greer was hiding the thrill of her New York

experience. He slowly brought him self around to the realization she might not come back, even for their fantasy year.

Dan and Siobhan met Greer by telephone. Dan felt it was rather serious because Quinn was spending the summer very much alone except his visits to Maldonado and a long week when Carlos came home.

Was Dan more desperate to know more about Greer—or more desperate not to rock the boat?

“She Catholic?”

“Nope. Why?”

“Well, you know it’s better if everyone’s the same religion.”

“Why?”

“You know, kids and all.”

“Dad, we’re not that serious about each other.”

“Sure, good,” Dan would say, relieved.

“Greer a good cook?”

“Pizza Hut’s finest.”

“She a Nixon person?”

“She’s a Kennedy liberal.”

“They say most of the girls at Colorado are on the wild side.”

“You mean, like Mom?”

The feeling was forlorn as August ended and Labor Day led to the new semester.

Greer had not returned as promised, and he could feel the apprehension in her voice. Phone calls had slowed to a trickle. Greer told him she’d be working on late shifts or have to cover something out of town or would be a second teamer on a big event in Manhattan.

No calls for ten days. Quinn didn’t complain as he braced for the fall.

“Son,” Dan said with great empathy, “why don’t you bring one of your girlfriends up to the ranch and head up to the cabin for the weekend? You’ve been getting calls from everyone else all summer.”

“Except from Greer.”

“You haven’t smiled much this summer, either.”

“Appreciate your sympathy, Dad, but let’s call it for what it is. You’d be just as happy if she stays in New York.”

“Yes and no. I don’t like to see you this unhappy. I’m your father, and I’m entitled to an opinion. Greer Little will never give you what you need. The pain of losing her will diminish. It simply wasn’t meant to be.”

“Never truer words spoken,” Quinn said with a saddened voice.

Siobhan’s foot kicked the screen door open, and she set a pair of grocery bags on the counter.

“Any more groceries?”

“Yes.”

As he went out the back door, the phone rang and Siobhan took it. When Quinn returned, she handed him the phone, appearing somewhat dumbstruck. Dan had his face halfway down his coffee cup. Siobhan smiled very weakly as she left the room with Dan.

“Quinn,” he said.

“I’m on the way back to Colorado,” Greer said at the other end. “Baby, I haven’t been laid all summer. Can’t fight you, man.”

Quinn’s sigh was complete with vocals.

“Here’s the skinny. I’m flying to Junction to see my family. I’ll be at your apartment sometime Sunday.”

“Me, too. We’ve got a round-up in the high country and a branding, but I’ll be in Sunday as well. Baby, is this for real?”

“Changed your mind?”

No way.

Greer arrived first, bursting with Manhattan stories she wanted to

share but afraid they’d bother as much as please Quinn. Like the

madness in the increasingly strong gay community and women’s lib, she

had said she had not had sex, which was virtu * *

ally true, but the dancing until four, the party refreshments and the speeded-up scene .. . the vastness of the New York Public Library, the height of the Empire State, the whiz of graffitied subways. One night dancing, one night maudlin. She didn’t let on about the staggering pain of his loss.

Whatever! Greer Little did not go unnoticed anywhere!

Quick, she said to herself at Quinn’s apartment, before he arrives from Troublesome. She opened the first of two suitcases. Out came a trapeze to hook over the beams above the mattress in the nook. A whip, but mercifully covered in velvet, handcuffs, and .. . candles: big candles, little candles, smelly candles, floating candles, Christian candles, Jewish candles. There were enough undergarments to outfit a small chorus line—or a chorus line of small women. The balance of the suitcase held a variety of adult toys.

The second case held the artist’s paraphernalia. Greer undressed and stood before the bathroom mirror. First on went an orange-colored wig; then she painted her face down the middle, violet on the left side and orange on the right. She encircled her breasts with a swath of green on the right breast and red on the left.

“Bottoms, bottoms,” she said to herself. White thigh boots. Now, let’s see, here we go. Across her midsection she painted the words and spread sparkles on it, reading: PRAISE THE LORD.

Greer heard a car parking outside. Holy moly—not a second to spare. She caught her breath and stood a few feet back, so he would have to get full sight of her.

A knock on the door. “Use your keys, I’ve got my hands full,” she called.

The key was tight from its summer’s rest. Finally, the door popped open.

“Fuck me, man!” Greer cried, holding arms and legs spread eagled.

A number of beats of silence were required for everyone to get rearranged. Siobhan held a pair of shopping bags.

“Excuse me,” Siobhan said, “I was looking for the brothel. I’ll try down the hall.”

“Mrs. O’Connell?”

“Yes, lovely meeting you in person at last.”

“Oh, God!”

Siobhan set the bags down and went to the kitchen cabinet. “I think I need a drink,” she said, and belted down some Lemon Hart before Greer could stop her, staggered to the kitchen table as Greer pumped several glasses of water into her.

Suddenly, they looked at one another and burst out laughing and replayed the grand entrance and went hysterical.

“Thank God Dan wasn’t here!” Siobhan screamed. “Or Maldonado!”

“Or Maldonado’s daughter!”

“Or Father Scan!”

“Or the dean of admissions!”

“You weren’t exactly expecting this, were you, ma’am?”

Greer was up front with Siobhan. She and Quinn were classical sad ships passing in the night.

“Fifteen weeks is a long time, Greer. Life isn’t going to stop, a million things can happen.”

“You want me to go back to New York?”

“You’re going back,” Siobhan said. “I just don’t know how it would work if Quinn followed you there. When we traveled together looking for colleges, New York lit him up for the moment, but he’s not a lit-up man. I’m glad he knows there is a New York. I’m glad we are able to keep him studying. He’s not heading for oblivion, and he’s not a loser. But unlike you, he does not know what he needs.”

“He knows. He desperately wants to find his roots. No one other than

Quinn can control that hunger. Listen to me, Siobhan, maybe I’m the

only one who has understood his intensity. He wants peace, which I

could never give him. He wants, how do I say it, the man wants to make things better for every living thing.”

“Will you stay for a year?” Siobhan asked.

“A year is a long time. I’m a pretty crazy number to nail down.”

Having gathered the bazooka, washboard, bones, Jew’s harp, kazoo, and four horn brass band, Quinn burst in with | them playing, “Don’t Roll Them Bloodshot Eyes at Me.”

*

BOULDER, 1971

Greer Little was a lover whose mind never strayed far from the scene. All the power pieces concealed in Quinn responded fivefold. Their open boldness of speaking out and then usually acting it out was astonishing.

It got so that the mere touching of one another while walking past each other could set off a conflagration. As apprehensions faded to trust, a cool sweetness settled over them. Time, thank God, stood still. The inevitable parting at the end of a year seemed far away, way down the runway.

When out of kissing distance, they rushed back together. And the humor was salty, raunchy, and very high. Neither of them were out to make the dean’s list but read voraciously when too exhausted to make love. They learned what their schools could give them, mostly learned on the queen-size mattress in the nook, where she went to read, with the kitchen chair for himself.

Once a week was party time. The place overflowed with happy, frustrated, angry, bewildered, and scared campus kids. Drugs were minimal, not so sex. It was the kind of campus where Nixon’s visit to China might get as much discussion as a new psychedelic drug. Oh, if they only had something going like Quinn and Greer.

Little bits at a time, Greer felt all right about giving him little pieces of New York. She did not want him to think she was heading back to some kind of subway or Central Park murder. She understood that Quinn was only partly interested in their trips on the wild side, and this gave her a sense of peace that the city was just not his thing. She’d often think, “We met in the wrong century, darling, but praise the Lord, we stopped and went a little way, hand in hand.”

During the past summer, Greer had cruised the scum holes of Eighth Avenue, purchasing books and magazines and checking out the porn films. The New York Public Library offered another trove. Crossing out and combining, she came up with a list of a hundred and six ways for them to make love.

“Done that, done that,” Quinn said, reading the list. “So, what’s new?”

“Us. Keep reading.”

“What! You found this in the New York Library?”

“In the same section with Mary Poppins.”

“You didn’t get this at the library. You have a fertile and diseased mind.”

“That’s beautiful, Quinn. You make a girl cry.”

Sometimes they smoked a joint, mostly at parties. Quinn felt he was in control, and she went wild with lust. The best times were three in the morning, waking up drowsy, downing a big glass of o.j. and having a few tokes on the bongo.

Quinn set the drug limit. After seeing two men on the team smash up on LSD and coke, he drew a line. She broke the rule once with cocaine, and he moved out for two weeks until she swore, and kept her promise of, no more coke. “Coke is the devil, baby. The devil is at his smartest when you don’t believe there’s a devil. Chrissake, when you were cruising Eighth Avenue, didn’t you see what it did? How about coke at work?”

“Yeah, some girls and fellows at the studio really busted themselves up. Thank God, I’ve got you.”

The honey kisses—passing a syrupy ice cube into each other’s mouth and letting it melt and run down their necks and licking it off. Daring, risking, they opened each other up entirely.

The touch, the touch, the touch. That’s all it took as a forerunner to a full night’s journey or a quick leap off the pier. They read each other perfectly.

After a few visits to the ranch Dan softened considerably. Siobhan’s usual loveliness was always tempered by the hidden fear that Greer might not return to New York. These two kids were filling up huge storage tanks for a lifetime, for a hundred and twenty years.

The first chill was at Christmas, which they had to awkwardly split between Grand Junction and the ranch. However, it was a good thing they went outside and got some fresh air. Quinn liked her father, a double-A shortstop .. .

“Dad could have made it to the show, but he could never hit a motherfucking slow curve inside,” Greer explained.

“That was the first thing you taught me,” Quinn said.

“Too bad she was born of the opposite sex. But you know, she sure can manage a team. Little Leaguers. One kid was pushing her button the year they won the state. She soaped out his mouth in front of the rest of them and made him apologize .. . well, in my estimate Jimmy Foxx was the greatest power hitter of them all because he was right-handed.”

Joyful and Triumphant.

After a gallop through the low meadow Quinn had to carry her into the house and set her in a tub. Roping was out of the question.

O Come Ye, O Come Ye.

NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1971

New Year’s. All the apartments opened their doors. Sad revelers and happy revelers wondered what it meant. Nuclear devastation was all the talk. A downer ran through the land.

But most of those on downers had each other. The New Year’s kiss was always a kiss of hello. In that instant Greer and Quinn knew it was a kiss of good-bye; the awful countdown had begun.

At a late-winter indoor baseball practice, Quinn was whacking the ball as though he had Superman’s eyes. He had crossed a magic line where his psyche could slow the ball down.

She watched him now as though she had turned a page forever and it didn’t read like the old madcap joy of the other page. Although they still had months left on their odyssey, a residue of discontent had begun in the pit of her stomach.

Quinn was, as usual, hunched over the kitchen table, far away, into Joseph Campbell, when she came home rather draggy. She mussed his hair and turned on the teakettle.

“How was your day, honey?” Quinn asked.

“Oh, fine except for one little thing,” she said, sitting opposite him.

“You’re pregnant,” Quinn said.

“How did you know?”

“I can count to twenty-nine.”

She shook her head. His hand pulled her over to his lap. He rubbed her stomach. “Not too much room in there.”

“You don’t seem too upset, Quinn.”

“The way we’ve been going at it, we don’t keep throwing a dare at God. Anyhow, I thought about it early on. Last few days, I’ve thought about it much. We’ve gotten down a lot of road. Let’s talk, Quinn-and-Greer talk.”

“Oh, Jesus, you’re wonderful,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder and allowing herself to sob.

“I love you, Greer. We decide, I’ll abide.”

“My own Reverend Jackson. It’s not that big a deal these days. They’re

happening every day on campus. When I found out, I was just going to

have it fixed, have an abortion and string you along. I, uh, even made an appointment. I couldn’t do it. I love you, man. We won’t marry and I’ll go on to New York with the baby.”

“That’s got a bad downside, baby. My daughter, my son, I want to raise it. Single parent in Manhattan for a twenty-two year-old woman? Not when you are set to launch a dynamic career.”

“Adoption?” she whispered.

“No!” he cried. “No! Greer, have the child. I’ll raise it in

Colorado, and in time it’ll meet its mother.”

“You’re ready to take on something like this?”

“Very much so.”

Greer wept. “You’re too good for me. I’m a selfish bitch.” She grabbed his hands and pleaded. “You know I can’t start out in New York with an infant.”

“We’ve blown out the lights, Greer. In five thousand years no couple has enthralled each other more. We’re way ahead, baby and all.”

“Suppose we marry other people?”

“He’ll have a mother and a father, and it will be up to you what kind of relationship you want to make. At least he’ll always know where he came from—or she .. . the thought of a baby girl .. . really makes me smile.”

After his nap, Father Scan came down from his apartment to a room seemingly sticky with wet tar. Siobhan, Dan, and Quinn were wearing their Eugene O’Neill faces.

“Am I family or am I the priest?” Scan asked.

“I’ve written and talked to you about Greer Little,” Quinn began.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t take your advice. You’re right, Uncle Scan,

the piper must be paid. Greer is not your ordinary hausfrau, no

offense, Mom. She’s one of the most brilliant communications students

this university has ever put out. She’s also a wild woman. She’s

graduating and has three or four jobs waiting for her in New York. We

thought we’d like to do one year in paradise before we got on with the nuts and bolts of our lives.”

“And she’s pregnant,” Father Sean said, “but wants to continue on in New York?”

“That’s right.”

“They weren’t normal!” Dan cried.

“That’s what they wanted,” Sean said, “not to be normal. Were you quite wild?”

“Yes, sir,” Quinn replied.

“Were other people involved?” Sean asked.

“No, just the two of us.”

“Drugs?”

“One or two joints a week. Nothing else.”

“I felt,” Siobhan said, “Greer was not right for Quinn from the beginning. I also knew if he went to New York after her or if we disapproved, we’d lose him.”

“She can’t cook,” Dan said, “she can’t sew, she can’t ride, she’s not a Catholic.”

“Shut up, Dan. You love this girl?” Sean asked.

“Yes. We ... we ... we ... won’t marry. That would be a farce.”

“What do you want to do, Quinn?”

“I want her to stay here, carry the baby to term, and have the child. I want to take care of it for the rest of my life.”

“Slut!” Dan bellowed. “Dirty, skinny, rotten slut.”

“Dan, stop it!” Siobhan cried.

“Dad, never say that again! Dad, don’t ever say that!”

“Are we so damned certain it’s Quinn’s child?”

“That’s enough, ClanI” Sean commanded. “My Roman collar is off! No and no! You can’t bring a child here into this hatred. Yes, Quinn could leave and this time for good. You are a very decent man, Quinn, but you are innocent of what is required to raise such a child whose mother is alive and in all likelihood might never contact him. Haven’t you had enough of that, Quinn, than to pass down your own misery?”

“You’re not suggesting an abortion,” Siobhan wept.

“Yes, I am,” Scan said, “and God help me.”

“The only way,” Dan mumbled, “is to have her get her abortion and I’ll give her ten thousand dollars.”

“You’ve just told me everything I want to know, Dad. Greer doesn’t want the baby here, same way you didn’t want me here! Too bad my parents let me be born. Go on, man, throw the fetus in a garbage can.”

“Dan, I’m on my hands and knees,” Siobhan cried, “and it will be Quinn’s son.”

“I’m out of here,” Quinn said softly. “Pack my things.”

“Oh, go ahead! Getting to be a routine,” Dan said. “Every time you’ve looked at me since you were ten, Quinn, you’ve blamed me. You’ve looked at me in that way that said, you’re not my father. What about my feelings! I took it all, but this is it. You and that tramp!”

Siobhan was speechless, clinging to Quinn.

“And you, Father Sean, advising me to kill my baby. Have it in a public toilet and throw it in a Dumpster,” Quinn cried.

“Yes, I did,” Sean said meekly.

“Before you go crawling back to that little whore, take this with you. Greer’s a whore just like your birth mother. Your mother was a nun and a whore!”

“Is that true?”

“No,” Sean said.

“My church .. . my church telling me to spend my entire life with a lie. My priest, my uncle saying murder it.”

Quinn walked out without looking back.

A sense of urgency, a need for clear thinking, enveloped Quinn as he sped back to Boulder. The idea of fatherhood swelled up in him like Billy Bigelow in Carousel: my little boy .. . my little girl.. .. This kid will know love. This precious little life will not be wasted by human haggling over commas and semicolons. “No nightmares for you, honey.”

He arrived at the apartment knowing what he must do.

Whatever, however, she would carry the baby to term. Whatever, however! The door was unlocked. He flung it open.

“Greer!”

He saw her cap and sunglasses on the table. “Where the hell are you?” He flung open closet doors, tried the bathroom. Empty. A faint sniffle caught his ear. She was curled up against the wall beneath a long worktable.

“Baby, come out of there, come on.”

She crawled out, fell into him, and became hysterical.

“I had it taken care of!” she screamed.

All one could hear was painful breathing and a sudden return to calm.

“The minute I had it done, I realized what I’d done. I love you, man. I can’t leave you! To hell with New York, Quinn. I’ll stay. Marry me and we’ll make another baby!”

He provided comfort and shelter and soft, sad smiles. Their time had passed. And every night as he held her he felt her pain growing smaller and smaller and then the urge to be Greer again, fly away Greer, took over.

And she left.

TROUBLESOME MESA, 1973

It had been a long time since Carlos Martinez had come home. On the last occasion, they’d had his graduation from the University of Texas and he took night school in law. He had been taken by a prestigious law firm in Houston which handled masses of Mexican business.

Although very much of a junior partner, Carlos quickly established he would earn his salt. He spent much of his time in legal work below the border and often in many places in South America and the Caribbean.

Carlos wore the best. In a short time he knew he would be driving the best, sailing the best, and perhaps even flying the best. He was clever and brilliant and forceful, a rare combination for one so young.

Coming back to the ranch was a mixed blessing. His father and mother, Pedro and Consuelo, had reduced their workloads and enjoyed the comforts of coming age.

Juan, the youngest of his brothers, was the rancher. Under the watch and direction of his father, Juan evolved to take over as foreman.

The Martinez family was a twenty-five-percent partner in the ranch, so the generations were doing their proper thing. At least one son in the Martinez family would remain.

The O’Gonnells? Quinn was gone, out of contact with everyone except Reynaldo Maldonado and his daughter, Rita. A permanent pall of dusk had fallen over Dan and Siobhan. Fiesta!

The entire valley, including Mormons, came for the spice and feast. Carlos devoured the female attention as well as the awe of the ranchers’ boys. “See who I am!” his manner said. “I will drive a Corvette next year! You didn’t think Carlos would be so great, did you?”

The valley girls seemed rather heavy and frumpy to him. Their best clothing was drab. Ranch girls were for ranch boys, who were not so particular.

It was all a great victory for Carlos, the return of the triumphant son!

And then he saw Rita Maldonado and her father wending their way through the crowd to him.

“Jesus,” he whispered to himself.

How old would she be now? Seventeen. Reynaldo had never painted or sculpted a woman as beautiful as his daughter. She was Aphrodite with dark hair and just enough of her mother’s Nordic genes to refine her features.

“Carlos,” she cried, throwing her arms about him.

“You’ve grown up.”

That included an observation of her bosom and everything else. They remained standing and looking at one another until people around them became uncomfortable.

They rode their horses on the familiar trails they had ridden as children and young people. Only now Quinn was missing. Quinn’s absence hovered over the homecoming and dampened their joy.

They dipped their feet in an icy stream near big boulders a thousand feet above the ranch.

“It’s not the same without Quinn here, is it?” she said.

Carlos shook his head. “I saw him a few times when I was in San Diego on business. He didn’t talk much about why he left Troublesome.” “I don’t know, either,” Rita said. “He had this girl, her name was Greer, whom he loved very much. When she went away to New York on an internship, he moaned on Mal’s shoulder almost every night. Then she came back, and after a year they broke up and Quinn left. Neither his mother nor father will speak about him. I know he doesn’t write to them. Some kind of Catholic thing, I think.”

“It’s not the same,” Carlos repeated. “See, even though I was the older, it was Quinn who protected me in the school yard and taught me so much.”

“And you taught him, too, Carlos. Anyhow, we exchange letters every month. I would write him more often, but I don’t want him to owe me letters. You know what I mean.”

“Funny, he’s always been a sort of hero to me,” Carlos said. “I think I’ve come to learn his lessons by practicing law now. So much of law is rotten and lies and cheating. I realized, only recently, that Quinn was never that way. If he promised you something, it was done.”

Carlos stared at Rita, hard, found a large sitting rock, and put on his boots. He was numb from the sight of her. When she had stepped into the water, she had held up her wide, twirling skirt and showed her magnificent legs, and her scooped blouse showed her magnificent bosom. Rita came to him pensively.

“I suppose we’ve both lost him,” Carlos said.

“What do you mean, Carlos?”

“I remember the day you and Mal moved into your house. The day after that you were in love with Quinn. What were you? Six or seven?”

“Did I show it that much?”

“I saw it. The three of us were together a lot.”

“Well, Quinn Patrick O’Connell has never had eyes for me. I am still

his baby sister. I cried alone a lot when he fell in love with that

Greer woman. And when they broke up, I can’t say that I was unhappy. I sent him photographs to indicate I wasn’t a little girl anymore, but he didn’t seem to notice. I suppose he must have a hundred women in San Diego.”

Carlos said nothing, which said everything.

“I was a fool, Carlos. No more. I want to get into things.” “What things?”

She put her arms around his neck and drew her lips to his and pressed her body against his as a punctuation mark. Carlos held her at arm’s length in amazement. She kissed him again, but he spun away.

“Is this your way of getting even with him?” Carlos asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“What do you know?” Carlos asked.

“I know that for the last three years you have had a yearning for me. And I sent you photographs because I wanted you to yearn for me. When I knew you were coming to Troublesome, I also knew that the time had come for me to enter the society of womanhood. I know,” she went on haltingly, “how gentle you are and that I trust you and I want you to be gentle with me.”

They flung themselves at each other and held on and rocked .. .

“So unfair to Quinn,” Carlos cried.

“No! He made his choice. It is not unfair to Quinn. You can’t feel guilty for a man who has spurned you as a woman. Guilty of what? Discovering my lover was you all this time?”

Their bursting forth let loose torrents of restraint, a restraint of younger years. Rita and Carlos were as wild as the giant boulders and icy stream and needled ground. During the week of his stay, they went off each day, mesmerized.

When the end of the stay was at hand, both of them were sad. “How hard is it for you to get to Denver?” Carlos asked.

“I can, on weekends.”

“What about Mal?”

“I’ll tell him I have a boyfriend in Denver.”

“That part of it is true, but what about the other?”

“Quinn is gone from my life,” she said. “So, why do we have to lie?”

“I don’t know what I don’t know,” Carlos said, “only that you and I as lovers would further poison the well with the O’Connells and my parents. Rita, I have never known days like these. I love you. I want you to be mine always.”

“But:1” she asked.

“I am only starting my career. I am not so far along that I can take a wife. I travel endlessly. We have an office in Denver I can work out of once or twice a month.”

Reluctantly, Rita had to come around to his way of thinking. “Papa’s heart would be broken if I did not finish my schooling,” she said at last.

“We’ll see each other in Denver,” he asked pleadingly, “until the way becomes clear for us?”

“Something is going to happen, Carlos, something bad.”

“Don’t be superstitious,” he said.

Carlos Martinez would be a fine choice, she thought. I’m glad he was the first man. Yes, a fine choice, if she could not have Quinn.

PAW TUCKET RHODE ISLAND-LATE 1970s

The personal greening of Thornton Tomtree began with spring’s warm breezes hushing up the immaculate lawn of Dwight Grassley’s yachting club, a somewhat tattered royalty that once had defended the America’s Cup. With T3’s name gaining coin about the country, Dwight sponsored Tomtree into the elite world of Newport.

Scion of the old Grassley family, Dwight had the duty of seeing that his female siblings made suitable marriages. He had three sisters: one barely coherent, in a Tribeca loft, one who did everything right, and one who was a problem. Penny, the barefoot, skinny-dipping conte ssa was not a bad artist, but she loved the many men who passed her way. Three of them had left her bearing three quite different children. It bothered Dwight that she was the happiest of them all, give or take a suicidal incident or two.

Nini, on the other hand, did everything right. A Newport Yacht Club wedding to be forgotten as soon as the ice sculpture melted. The couple were both homely but produced beautiful children.

Pucky was the problem. She was a long streaker, a tall, thin girl of

five foot eleven. She had a pleasant face, though her teeth were a

mite large. Pucky knew from her first boarding school what her route would be in the airless, closed Newport society.

She’d leave the race car drivers to Penny.

Looking closely at Pucky, one would see a personality bubbling like a newly opened bottle of Perrier. Her body was thin but made the right slow turns at the right places, giving her a tall flow which she knew how to use.

What seemed to be a shallow inlet was very deep, filled with disarming knowledge of a wide range of subjects. Somewhere along the line Pucky became very comfortable with herself, and she stopped the bull-moose monetary charges of a number of the yacht club’s finest who tried to court or seduce her.

Thornton Tomtree’s appearance immediately drew her interest. He seemed even taller than he was because of his growing stature in the national community.

T3, as he came to be known, didn’t like the yacht club scene, but neither did she. Those qualities, deep down, unspoken, got to her. She saw him as a great big Newfoundland puppy, not quite coordinated, but a lonely man needing a compassionate woman, wife, lover.

Pucky, whose short list usually ran to actors, writers, and artists in Providence, suddenly found herself taken by an industrialist!

She was far from invisible. She sailed splendidly, was a charming hostess, a charity workaholic, and mainly—a force in the cultural life of the state, including the great jazz festival.

Providence had become a strong satellite community for the artists who couldn’t quite cut it in New York. Pucky’s long suit was her quiet but very serious help for the creative. “Tis told” she was very romantic.

When all was said and done, Pucky wanted Thornton Tomtree’s magnificent mind, or enough of it to take her to places where she might get a chance look into his ethereal world.

Penny set Thornton up by sending him to the family’s beach cabana to get Pucky a towel, and he entered to find her naked.

Totally unexpected, she appeared as a tall, beautifully proportioned Greek statue, particularly her breasts, from which he could not remove his eyes.

T3 Industries netted a billion dollars the day they were married. He purchased Nanatuck Island, built a twenty-thousand square-foot home among the climbing rocks and flat level plateaus, and he helicoptered to and from Pawtucket.

The early years were palatable enough. Pucky gave birth to the required son and daughter a few years later.

His premarital introversion which she had found so charming did not hold up. The bloom fell off the rose. Clunk.

The ensuing twenty years was a catalogue of Thornton’s indifference to her and the good things she did.

Pucky Tomtree never did travel very far into her husband’s mind. He had a built-in walled city of a brain, connected mostly to speak the new language of the computer.

The fork in their road ran in opposite directions, and that was the way they evolved, away from one another. He showed up at a few baroque string quartets played at the Newport mansions for high-scaled charity events. Pucky was more at home with the jazz trumpets at the people’s festival.

Their children, CiCi and Thomas Carmichael Tomtree, grew up flatly within the required Grassley-Newport framework. They were flat in ambition, flat in achievement, great sailors and peacefully took their places in line on the inheritance ladder and went on to live flat wealthy lives with flat wealthy mates. But before taking that flat voyage as permanence in life, both drifted into the flower-child, hippie scene and had to be retrieved from Haight-Asbury on two occasions.

Pucky simply had too much vitality. Unable to plumb her husband’s mind or excite him physically, she endured for a time as indentured chattel. For Thornton, sleep meant working out a problem in his dreams.

Lovemaking meant working out a manufacturing glitch.

New York? Theater? A waste of time. Those puffy-cheeked clarinetists blowing out “Saints”? Good Lord, Pucky, what next? Conversation? To what avail if not to advance your business?

After two decades and out from under child rearing, Pucky threw in the towel. Her confidant was—who else but Darnell Jefferson?

“T3 is more a piece of technology than a human being,” she had told Darnell over and over again.

Even knowing the two were too far separated ever to have a fruitful and peaceful relationship, Darnell sideslipped the discussion until he saw a woman coming on fifty nearly totally melancholy.

“You knew what you were getting into, Pucky.”

“I knew and I never complained.”

“You went into the marriage with Thornton thinking you could change him, fuck him into compliance. Too many wives fling open the refrigerator on their wedding night and say, you don’t need those hot dogs, but you should have more yogurt. Nobody in the world can change Thornton Tomtree. He’s an original.”

“You can,” she challenged.

“Pucky, I can’t produce his testosterone for him.”

So, on she went with her good works in the arts, traveling to and from Washington on national committees, patronizing the theater in her region, supporting young artists. It was all very Grassley. And Pucky was to be congratulated for stabilizing her son and daughter so ultimately they were neither hippies nor druggies.

The master bedroom at Nanatuck faced the sea, complete with a hot tub and a play area. Thornton slept in the dark-dark because too much light hurt his eyes.

About five in the morning, most mornings, Pucky was awakened by the sound of Thornton in his bathroom, urinating and brushing his teeth.

She quickly went to her own bathroom, and he knew exactly how long it took her to prepare and get back under the covers.

A very low-key ritual dance began with a peck of a kiss followed by certain wigglings and allah-kazam, they were in the missionary posture. Give or take, the entire drill lasted around fifteen minutes. It was impossible for Pucky to confront him with his sexual inadequacy. He simply didn’t get it, require it, or see that there should be more to it.

The woman kept it to herself, had herself tied off after the daughter was born, and lived with a low tide of sadness always near.

Darnell always had business in New York and Washington, where T3 maintained offices. It was a wild time of happenings from the Challenger explosion to the Chernobyl disaster to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He and his present wife often accompanied Pucky to Broadway theater, Lincoln Center, or the wild bright spots in the Village.

At the end of the night she often did not go back to the T3 apartment on Park Avenue but drifted down to the Village alone to her sister Penny’s loft. Darnell did not know that anything was amiss but suspected it.

He did not want such a tight relationship with Thornton’s wife. It put him on the middle of a fault.

A time back, Darnell had convinced Thornton that he should establish a charitable foundation. The monster bill was tens of millions; its guiding philosophy was a support system for engineering, medical, and scientific research.

“Over my dead body,” warned Thornton when Darnell proposed a five-million-dollar research grant for AIDS. T3 was alive and well when the gift was made. It grabbed national attention, and suddenly over a hundred gay employees of T3 Industries came out of the closet.

Darnell worked the boss like he was playing a fine violin, so Thornton got credit for putting Pucky on the foundation board. It was a brilliant move, one that put a light into her eyes again.

Dr. Hans Neucamp, president of the Tomtree Foundation, was tired and sported squinting red eyes. “Grant number one hundred twenty-two,” he said, “thirty thousand dollars to Utah State for finishing ponds for the rest of the freshwater fish experiments.”

No objections.

“And one more. The Peterson brothers in Toledo. Their battery will drive a Jeep three hundred miles without a charge. They’re onto the right system for a breakthrough,” Dr. Neucamp said.

Thornton nodded his head.

“Well, that’s it,” Neucamp said.

“If I hear no objections, I propose we vote to pass the grants unanimously.”

“I object,” Pucky said. Emerge from your long darkness now, Darnell had pleaded with her. She caught a glimpse of Darnell on the right side of T3.

Come on, baby, Darnell thought, kick ass.

“Mrs. Tomtree?” Dr. Neucamp asked with a crooked smile and a voice that leapt just a few notes higher.

“What the hell is this all about?” Thornton snapped, looking at his watch. He leaned closer to Darnell, and Darnell nodded. “This being the case, we’ve had a very long day. Why don’t we adjourn till tomorrow? I’ll see what’s on Mrs. T’s mind, and it will only take a few minutes to wrap it up. See you here at ten.”

Dr. Neucamp wanted to hear what transpired, badly, but Darnell took his elbow and guided him through the leather door. The other board members, a cross section of intimidated silence, slunk out.

Darnell phoned the press office and told them to hold up the fund announcements.

“My goodness,” Pucky said, ‘”I object’ were the first two words I’ve spoken in ten board meetings. I object, I object, I object.”

Darnell started to leave.

“Come back here. You’re not leaving me alone with this crazy woman.”

“MIT, Cal Tech, Carnegie-Mellon, are going to be drenched in joy tomorrow,” she said.

“I know what my bride is up to,” Thornton said.

“When I came on the board, you agreed that a portion, not specified, would go to the arts. A portion of zero is zero.”

“Correct! Nothing of nothing is nothing. And nothing is where the arts are going in the next century. Playwrights have abandoned the stage, and novels will become relics. They prefer to spread crap thinner and thinner on a hundred and fifty TV channels.”

“Hold on, Thornton,” Pucky commanded. “We woke up from a war singing, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” It was the nation’s song of hope. Brilliant and talented people carried this through the middle of the century with golden plays, golden novels, and golden theater. They were as good as any in American history. Richard Rogers, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck .. . Lord!”

“The people have made their choice, Pucky. I’m only following their orders,” Thornton answered.

“Their orders! To conceal corporate greed?”

“Oh, Jesus, Pucky. People have gladly traded their freedom for a web site. Everything, everything is going to be packaged and merchandized so they won’t ever have to get up off the couch again. You’ve heard the rappers .. .

“Oh, woe is me, Cop on the beat, mean mother, I’m in pain without gain,

So, listen up, brother, And listen up, dykes I’ll slash you for yo Hikes!

“You want me to support this noise?” he continued. “You want me to support so-called artists floating livers in bottles of urine and calling it art? Where are the men and women who write for the stage? A single American play a year might get through to Broadway. Not a single goddamned play in twenty five years. Jesus Christ, Superstar .. . that’s a musical?

“Listen up, Pucky, they are going to do up Broadway soon. Down with the hookers! Down with the pimps! Down with dealers! Down with the storefronts going out of business every week! Down with all the freaks! We are going to have us a sanitized, packaged, merchandized Broadway. When they run the faggots out of Forty-Second Street, we’re gonna have Walt Disney’s itchy-clean Broadway ... a place where a man can take his wife and kids into itchy-clean T-shirt shops.”

For the first time Darnell had heard his boss passionate about something other than his computers. Thornton knew he was on the leading edge of a revolution for the minds of the people, one where instant gratification and not knowledge dug from deep places was going to be the rule. Thornton was dedicated to some kind of sterilization of society.

“I heard a golden-voiced man sing at Juilliard last night,” Pucky said as if in a trance. “He’s no chance without a scholarship because the tuition doesn’t cover a crippled wife and two children, and unless we provide it, we may have lost a new Pavarotti.”

“We’ve already got one. Who needs another one?”

“Thornton. Musicians and writers and most artists are the least greedy people in the world. Because they cannot function without support, what do we do? Every culture since man began has supported its creative heritage.”

“Can’t you see, woman, we’ve been shedding this past year by year. It’s

a new scheme of things. So what is it, Pucky? Have we abandoned the writers or have the writers abandoned us? Revivals are going clear back to the Student Prince—a la mode. Or would you prefer a British tete-a-tete? The writers are all making more money filling up time desperately on a hundred and fifty channels. Money is good! Writers never had money. So, my dear, give unto Disney what is Disney’s and sweep Times Square clean and have little fairy princesses passing out gumdrops on Forty-Second Street.”

Pucky was ashen. He had too much truth in his words, but damned if she would stand by quietly watching during a cultural collapse.

Now Darnell Jefferson jumped in. “Wait! Wait!” he cried. “I’m getting a vision. Pawtucket has just opened a ten-plex movie house. I go to the movies. What picture? Eight of them are buddy-uddy cop bang-bang films that must gross twenty million on the first weekend or die. Ah, at last a picture I want to see, badly. Passenger plane, a 747, off course, transatlantic flight. Somehow a half dozen terrorists get aboard with breakdown plastic guns. There is a case of deadly virus stored in the luggage compartment. If, oh God, the canister is found and opened by the vile terrorists .. . good-bye East Coast of America. The president of the United States is informed in his bad left ear while dozing in a reception line. Call a scramble to sitcomm.comm.comm.org, orders the president over the head of his chief of staff, Field Marshal Stoopnagel. Scramble the fighter planes of the famous Asshole Squadron. Shoot the motherfucker down if it gets closer than fifty miles off the coast. A sweet, innocent little girl in row twenty-two brushes the hair of her Barbie doll. Tm going to see my daddy in Sing Sing.””

Pucky and Thornton caught their breath and waited for Darnell to quit

ranting. He didn’t. “Wait a minute, is this the movie where the

poison was going to destroy the East Coast, or where it was carrying a

load of kudzu seeds to strangle every tree in the South? Well, we know

one thing, don’t we? Only one man can save the situation, Sylvester

Ford Harrison, who has played in sixty films without smiling. He is lowered into the 747 toilet by a jet helicopter. You know, brother and sister, I left the ten-plex rather disappointed, so when I got home I turned on the TV to get a breath of quality. They had an uptown audience of fourteen- and sixteen-year-olds and on the stage in front of the camera a lot of fat people. Jenny Degenerate, the hostess, asked Hydrangea Flapjacks if she’d had incest with her brothers and father. The audience squealed! Yes, ma’am, till I married my uncle.””

“All right, enough, Darnell. We have been patient. What are you trying to say?” Thornton demanded.

Darnell leaned over the table, and tears welled and perspiration dripped. “Thornton! For God’s sake! These pissy-ass movies and that pissy-ass television eat up more material in one day than was written by all the English authors during the entire Victorian era. Pucky is only trying to hold back an avalanche of ignorance.”

“All right,” Thornton said softly. “I want you to listen to something, and you tell me.”

He put a disk into the Bulldog’s CD-ROM and punched the required keys. In a few seconds music came over the speakers. It was sweet, melodic, dancy and teasy. It was pure Mozart.

Thornton changed the setting to what was obviously Beethoven. Pucky was caught up in trying to identify the symphony. It occurred to her that somehow, some unplayed and unpublished Mozart and Beethoven had been discovered. My God, it was world-shattering. “That’s the future of music,” Thornton said. “It is already the future of writing, as you have just documented so well, Darnell. The Bulldog was programmed to log fifty hours of each composer, then compose something new using the composer’s structure.”

“The computer composed that!” Darnell cried.

“That’s the future. Want to see some non-paintings by Rembrandt or

some non-statues by Michelangelo or maybe read a little non-Hemingway? Alas, the Bulldog is a little weak on Hemingway.”

Pucky looked around the office until she spotted the Ming vase she had bought at auction, snatched it from its stand, marched to his desk, lifted it over her head, and flung it into the monitor of the Bulldog.

MARINE CORPS AIR BASE, EL TORO,

CALIFORNIA—LATE 1970s

Throughout the history of the republic, military mavericks have popped up, some with innovations that changed the nature of war. After World War I, an Army Air Force general, Billy Mitchell, demonstrated the impossible, that airplanes could sink a battleship.

The Navy’s most renowned off-horse appeared in the form of Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, who gave nightmares to his superiors and Congress.

Marine Major General Jeremiah Duncan was a lesser maverick, but a maverick nonetheless. By the time of the Great Depression the American military had fallen into a pathetic state. There was congressional pressure to disband the Marine Corps or reduce it to giving concerts on the Capitol steps and serving as embassy guards.

It was incumbent upon a group of Marine officers, including Duncan, to reinvent the mission of the Corps and thereby save it from extinction.

Their thesis was simple but unique. In future wars, global in nature, tactics had to be developed to land men from the sea against fortified land positions.

The major test in World War I had taken place against the Turkish peninsula at Gallipoli. British naval gunfire bashed the Turkish forts and emplacements for weeks prior to a landing by Anzac, British, and French forces. The Allied troops were cut to pieces, and ultimately the campaign ended in a disaster that resulted in Winston Churchill’s removal from the Admiralty.

Away from probing eyes on the island of Vieques, off the east coast of Puerto Rico, the Marines went about developing the tactics that would become a key to victory in future wars. Naval gunfire was moved in close and concentrated on a single beach or two, forcing the enemy to retreat inland temporarily. The Marines would then land infantry, set up a perimeter, and dig in to ward off the inevitable enemy counterattack. The key was holding a piece of turf, then moving inland.

All that was needed was a war to prove the thesis. It came along in good time.

It has been said that Jeremiah Duncan’s first words as an infant were “Semper Fidelis.” He became the first fighter pilot ace when he shot down five Japanese Zeros in a single day over Guadalcanal, but was shot down in turn and somehow escaped alive. An ace, but he could fly combat no more.

As a battalion commander in Korea, when he was advised that his men were surrounded, he said, “Good, that makes the tactical situation simpler.” Duncan led his mangled forces back from the Chosin Reservoir on the Chinese border to the sea in the dead of an icy winter.

In Vietnam he was moved from field command to staff to develop and improve new tactics against a tenacious and resourceful enemy.

Jeremiah Duncan’s chest bore a Congressional Medal of Honor, a Navy Cross, and three Purple Hearts. Known with affection throughout the Corps as Dogbreath, he now longed to retire to the Eastern Shore, where he had a big old house, a dandy fishing boat, and scads of children and grandchildren.

His wife of thirty years upped and died tragically in a house fire, leaving him devastated and debilitated. The Corps hung on to him to get him through his bereavement.

Jeremiah never got to the Eastern Shore. He ended up with a vague title as adviser to planning at El Toro Marine Air Base. There on the outskirts of Los Angeles, he worked another innovation, the lightning strike force.

The Corps, along with Bell and Boeing, was developing a hybrid aircraft—the SCARAB, that could take off and land like a helicopter, then fly like a turbo-prop. It was designed to carry twenty-some Marines with medical, electronic, and specialty personnel.

As was his wont, Jeremiah was soon bucking heads with the top brass. As a lady colonel inched into his life, he finally requested his belated retirement.

It was no surprise when the commandant, General Keith Brickhouse, a gnarly specimen not unlike Duncan, showed up at El Toro. With a name like Brickhouse, the general had a reputation akin to Dogbreath’s.

“So, it’s you and Colonel Dorothy, eh? Getting hitched, Jeremiah?”

“If the Marine Corps wanted me to have another wife, they’d of issued me one. Cut to the chase, Keith, but let me advise you in advance—after Nam it took me six months to be able to write my name. Who sent you, Keith?”

“The President.”

“Well, you’ve got my attention.”

“As well as Defense, State, Joint Chiefs, and the CIA,” Brickhouse continued. “I didn’t assign you to El Toro to play with the SCARAB by accident.”

“Any damned fool could tell you we had to develop a rapid strike force. The SCARAB is interesting. Helicopter turned airplane turned helicopter and carrying more firepower than anything ten times its size, with the exception of nuclear weapons.”

“It’s more than that,” the commandant said. “Jeremiah,

we’re heading into an era of an entirely different kind of warfare, vomit warfare.”

“Like?”

“World terrorism. We must get a leg up. This Palestine Liberation Organization is just the tip of a gigantic iceberg. Playing by no rules and operating covertly, they can multiply like roaches. Every dingy little organization with a beef will feel free to call themselves Heroes of God on Tuesday and blow up a civilian aircraft and rename themselves Liberation Unit Twenty on Wednesday and take a classroom of kids as hostages. The bad news is that the Warsaw Pact nations and the Islamic states are giving them sanctuary, training camps, money, diplomatic passports, weapons. Thus far terrorist activity has been outside of the States. At the moment there is no way we can make the American public believe we are not immune. But something’s going to happen inside America, and sooner rather than later. It’s up to us to have something in the ready.”

“Let me finish this for you,” Duncan interrupted. “The President wants me to create a small, secret, lightning strike force. Once we identify a perpetrator of a terrorist act, we will hit a preplanned target in reprisal.”

“You heard that from you, not me,” the commandant retorted. “How do you think the SCARAB would fit in?”

Jeremiah did not have to stretch far to grasp that one. “The SCARAB could be a big part of the Marines’ future.”

“We’re thinking of ordering five hundred of them,” Brickhouse retorted.

Jeremiah had enjoyed playing with the SCARAB in the tightly guarded hangar. It brought him back to a first love, aviation. He had already surmised what the craft’s future role might be. The notion of marrying a lady colonel and retiring did not entirely appeal to him. The alternative was staying in the Corps.

“The SCARAB has potential. To do the rapid-force mission I want something faster, lighter, and with high-end missiles. I could soup the engines up. I’d want a titanium wing and install the new TAD laser bomb-guidance system,” he said.

“I’ll get the funding,” the commandant said quickly.

“I didn’t say I’d do it, Keith. I said I’d think it over.”

The commandant knew that either Jeremiah would agree or he would have to be retired. He waited.

“I want to build my own team,” Jeremiah snapped, “and I don’t want a

fucking congressional oversight committee buggering me—“

“Deal,” Keith interrupted.

“I’ll give you a list of the key people I need,” Jeremiah said, already caught up in the venture.

“If we’re staying top secret, it has to be an all-volunteer force,” the commandant said.

“Sure, fine. I’ll volunteer them,” Jeremiah answered.

Master Technical Sergeant Quinn Patrick O’Connell was the man to see at the El Toro helicopter command. He received new craft, oversaw electronic installations, personally ran all serviced ‘copters through their test drills, kept the manuals up to date, and pulled the best safety record in the Corps.

Quinn’s relationship with Major General Jeremiah Duncan formally began when the general’s personal ‘copter pilot took ill. He knew Dogbreath was playing around with some kind of flying egg crate in Q Hangar and ‘coptered often to Camp Pendleton, a skip down the coast and over to a semi-mysterious Marine Corps facility near Barstow in the Mojave Desert.

They flew together so often, a confidence between the two came naturally and was cemented when Quinn flew the boss to Vegas for a rendezvous with Colonel Dorothy.

Shortly after General Brickhouse’s visit, Jeremiah called the commander of El Toro. “I need to borrow a ‘copter pilot for a month or so. Send me Sergeant O’Connell and put him on detached duty.”

“I can’t spare him for a month, Jeremiah,” the commander retorted. “He’s key personnel.” “Then I’ll appreciate it doubly.” “Don’t you Dogbreath me!”

“Shall we put this down as a request and not an order?” “I hear you, I hear you.”

“Sir!” Quinn snapped, coming to attention before Duncan’s desk.

“Sit down, son.”

Oh, Christ, Quinn thought as the general reached out to shake his hand, I’m going to get my pockets picked.

“My ‘copter pilot has the crud. I’m going to need you for a month or so. Detached duty has been cleared. I trust you have no objections.”

“I understand your words, a month, but I don’t understand how long ‘or so’ might be.”

“Or so means or so.”

“I’m checking out a half dozen new men. A couple of them are real joy-stick freaks. Let me pick you a gung-ho man,” Quinn said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Can I have four or five days to brief the new NCO at the ‘copter compound?” Quinn asked.

“Take two.”

“Sir, uh .. .”

“What, son, what!”

“On your ‘copter, sir, I’d like to select the copilot.”

“In actual fact,” Jeremiah answered, “I’ll copilot.”

“Ohh.”

“I note a drop of enthusiasm in your voice,” the general grumbled.

Receiving no answer, he bellowed, “Well!”

“General Duncan, this here Corps holds you in the same reverence as Joe

Foss, Marian Carl, and Pappy Boyington’s Black Sheep. Sir, it was a

glorious day in our aviation history when you became the first American ace in a single day. However, General, World War II ended thirty-five years ago, and with these new systems you couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle.”

Duncan’s voice went from grumble to gurgle to rumble.

“Sir, there is a new poster on the far wall. Kindly read the top line of it from here.”

Duncan squinted, and squinted, then drummed the top of his desk ominously.

“What’s this all about, sir?”

“I need you,” Jeremiah said dead-on. “I’m putting together a special all-volunteer force, about two platoons’ worth, and I want you to volunteer.”

“Volunteer to do what?”

“I’d rather not have to explain,” he finally said, simmering down. “The nature of our mission requires utmost secrecy. I can’t tell you unless you volunteer.”

Quinn browsed back over their relationship, the Corps, and the present conversation. “Sir, my hitch is up in five months.”

“Then I’m asking you to ship over.”

“Sir, I love the Corps. It salvaged my life. When I find out what I’m good for in this world, a lot of my strength will have been born in the Marines. However, I’m not a career man.”

“Somehow, I prayed that you would be,” Jeremiah said somewhat sadly. “You’re as smart as they come, O’Connell. You’ll be a wild-ass success and make a great fortune on the outside.”

“I don’t believe that money is my motivation,” Quinn said.

“And that’s why I thought you’d choose a career in the Corps.”

“You’ve a great way of choking my windpipe, sir.”

“Sorry. You told me you were orphaned at birth.”

Yes, sir.

“My old man,” the general said, “worked Texas ranches and, believe it

or not, was a Baptist preacher on Sundays. We’re all looking for our father, one way or the other. Always trying to do something to make him proud of us. My father never made it big, nor did he live to see me get the first star pinned on my shoulder. First time I was supposed to retire, a long time ago, I got offers for positions not only from every defense plant, but from an airline, an oil company, a chain of ice cream stores. I received over thirty job offers, some at the kind of money I didn’t know existed. I just knew I couldn’t taste ice cream flavors for the rest of my life. What the hell could I do with money, anyhow?” “With your permission, sir,” Quinn said, standing.

“Sure,” he answered with a wave of the hand, “go.”

Quinn could not open the door. He tottered. “Sir.”

“You still here?”

“Sir, tell me the truth, just this once,” Quinn said.

Jeremiah grunted a smile. “I’ll try.”

“This mission?”

“It is the highest priority at the command of the President. I consider it about as important as anything any Marine alive could become involved in. And moreover, it’s a Marine’s fantasy.”

“I, uh, could extend my enlistment for two years.”

“You’ve made old Dogbreath very happy,” the general said. “First thing is to get those stripes off your sleeve. I’m skipping you over second lieutenant to first lieut.”

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, sir .. .”

“D L. “

But.. .

“There’s too much, too much .. .”

“Back-biting, regulations, kiss-my-ass?” the general volunteered.

“Something like that.”

“You’re a mustang,” Duncan said in reference to enlisted men who always

stayed enlisted at heart, no matter their rank. “When I hit the same

fork in the road,” he continued, “I sure as hell didn’t need

regulations on how to bow on lady’s night. So, they made me a Marine

gunner,” he said in reference to a special warrant officer rank above the enlisted men but below the officers, like a bridge between the two. The exploding-bomb insignias on their epaulets were highly respected. “Marine gunner,” Quinn said. “I like that, sir.” “Gunner O’Connell it is,” Duncan said. “And thanks, Marine.” Quinn knew what Jeremiah meant.

Thus, Jeremiah Duncan’s Recreation and Morale Unit was formed. RAM Company occupied a remote space at Pendleton and in the desert, and its fighters endured a regimen that would make the Navy Seals and Army Rangers cringe. These were light men so as not to add too much weight to the SCARAB load. Major Hugo Grubb, another mustang, honed them to a razor’s edge.

Cherokee Cottrell, who claimed to be half Sioux, had been on the wagon

for five years when Jeremiah pulled him from obscurity to pilot the

SCARAB.

A Harvard failure, Todd Wetmore IV, a super talent with something to prove to his family, came in as copilot and navigator.

A weirdo, Captain Novinski, without whom nothing electronic was purchased by the Corps, found and installed and tested every system now in use or on the planning boards.

Dogbreath got his titanium wing. It was six feet longer than the production wing of aluminum composite. Stronger and more rigid, the black wing made the craft faster, lighter, and able to carry more weight.

The Allison turbo-prop engines were pushed, then pushedagain.

Marine Gunner Quinn O’Connell wore many hats: backup on the electronic board, bombardier, Mayday pilot, and mostly logistics expert. He was given twenty potential worldwide targets to prepare for a counterinsurgency attack.

All the members of RAM Company doubled as medical corpsmen.

Jeremiah attached bomb racks to carry a mix of sixteen missiles, ultra-light, laser-guided, with explosive capacity not yet seen in combat.

What was created was a dual-capacity rototiller that could fly as a helicopter and convert in seconds to a standard turbo jet aircraft. She had a decent subsonic speed of 500 knots and, with spare fuel tanks, a range of two thousand miles. She could carry two dozen men plus pilots and topped out at an altitude of twenty thousand feet.

Every square inch and every pound allowable held a basket of systems, from laser-targeted lock-ons to ground-view.

She carried her own ordnance, crafted to fit her limited space and weight capacities. Her demonstrations were awesome, a lethal bombardment followed by a landing or ground hovering as twenty Marines debarked out of a rear ramp.

Nearly a year passed. The SCARAB was worked into higher levels of performance, as were the men of the RAM team.

In Europe in particular, terrorists kept upping the level of violence with increasing daring. Outside America, her buildings, businesses, and citizens were targeted even though the nation itself had not undergone an attack. This, everyone agreed, was only a matter of time.

The inevitable happened. An Air Force Lear jet crossing the Atlantic from Germany and carrying an American ambassador and an American NATO general blew up in midair.

A series of incredible breaks linked together .. .

In Frankfurt, an Israeli Mossad agent identified Iranians entering Germany and followed them to a rundown hotel in the foreign workers’ part of town. The Mossad informed the CIA.

Air Force Lieutenant Sumner Smith was officer on duty at the small-craft section of the Rhein-Main air base. Contacted by the terrorists, Smith had agreed to plant a briefcase bomb for a hundred thousand dollars.

The pilot of the Lear jet was able to send a Mayday call at the time of the explosion.

In a heightened state of alert, German police were able to catch the terrorists, six Iranians, at the airport and the autobahn hastening to leave Frankfurt.

Lieutenant Smith’s wife, a German national named Helga, discovered the hundred thousand dollars. In a nasty marriage, she took the money to the police.

Four of the Iranians confessed, as did Lieutenant Smith.

The president of the United States clamped on a lid of secrecy. There would be no public announcement. If pressed, they would say an aircraft was missing and they were investigating.

With confessions in their pockets and further confirmation, the President saw a window of opportunity to strike back!

“Jeremiah Duncan here,” Duncan growled.

“Hold up one minute, sir, for the President.” “General?”

Sir.

“One of our Lear jets carrying Ambassador August and NATO General Marplade blew up over the Atlantic about five hours ago. We scored the biggest break in the world by unbelievable apprehensions and confessions. Double and triple verifications are coming in. It was Iranian terrorists.”

it\r

Yes, sir.

“With this news in our pockets,” the President said, “and the Iranians in the dark, we feel we might pull off a counter strike even before our plane is reported missing. Now, has your team done virtual practice on any specific Iranian sites’?”

“Yes, sir, four or five of them.”

“How fast can you get to Washington?”

“I’m on the way. Do I have permission to do a little commandeering here and there?”

“Carte blanche. As soon as you’re in the air, establish communications with the Situation Room. They’ll be looking out for you.”

THE SITUATION ROOM—THE WHITE HOUSE-SEVERAL HOURS LATER

In the basement of the White House, the Situation Room was no futuristic phantasmagoria of a Hollywood intergalactic set, but a conference table ringed with brainy men. Gathered in, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, the secretary of Defense, the ranking man at State, the President’s defense adviser, and numbers of indispensable aides.

In the deep of night, Jeremiah Duncan arrived with a single aide, a Marine gunner. The two-man team accounted for the commander, chief planner, bombardier, and emergency copilot.

When the President assumed his seat and nodded to Major General Duncan, the animus about the table was tempered by a reluctant respect for the old Marine. It was merely a year ago that the Joint Chiefs had pleaded with Duncan to remain in the service for just this sort of eventuality. But, and it was a big but, at this table Duncan could be a rogue.

Jeremiah’s long tenure served him well. He played his presentation, knowing the President had to give Iran a whack or terrorist activity would ooze all over the European continent.

“Gentlemen, as we know,” Duncan said, plunging right into his remarks, “we have received a break that happens once in a lifetime. A German frau has ratted on her lieutenant husband, an American rat, and the Israelis in Frankfurt had the terrorists fingered before they could get out of town. A Lear jet is missing. The Iranian government does not know what we know. We can nail them.”

“But a lightning strike without rehearsals leaves a big margin for error.”

“Moreover, Duncan, we don’t know enough about your SCARAB’s capabilities.”

“Moreover, Duncan, we are going to lose precious time getting the SCARAB to the East Coast along with your RAM team.”

“Gentlemen, Mr. President, I used my discretionary powers and commandeered a C-5 jet cargo plane from Long Beach, folded up the SCARAB, and put it aboard along with twenty some Marines of the RAM team. We are ready to go.”

Pencils as sharp as daggers, pressed on foolscap pads, now lightened up. Assistants behind their bosses exchanged quick whispers.

“Have I got it straight? You brought your attack team and your airplane with you?”

Yes, sir.

Now there came a sincere clearing of throats and rapt attention.

“Marine Gunner O’Connell here has worked up plans for four potential raid sites in Iran. A Teheran power grid, a dam, and an oil terminal. Yet they won’t work in this situation.”

“You said there were four.”

“I’m coming to that. We learned as we went on to eliminate any plan which would require months of intelligence and massive use of resources. It defeats the rock-bottom mission of a lightning surprise attack.”

Gunner O’Connell asked for the screen to be lowered and operated a slide carousel of maps, photographs, tactics, and stat sheets.

“The genesis of this attack is to hit them in the next fifteen or twenty hours, in the middle of the night. RAM will be on its way to Iran even as Washington wakes up yawning tomorrow. Around noon Washington time, the Defense Department will report an American Lear jet is missing. A flash in the sky was seen. Some of our ships in the area are investigating. Gentlemen.” Dogbreath said, “I shit you not when I tell you the Iranians will still be squatting over their holes with their pants down.”

“What is your target, General Duncan?” the President asked.

Quinn clicked on a map of Iran. “Here,” Jeremiah said, pointing, “in

the dead center of the country between the Great Salt Desert and the Persian Gulf. As you know, it is a wild, bitter, mountainous region. Quinn?”

Click, click.

“This is the area around Mount Shir. It stands at around twelve thousand feet and is commanded by an overlook fortress. The fort is a couple centuries old, of mud brick, but from it the military is able to control an enormous, sparsely populated area. For generations Fort Urbakkan commanded the area, collected taxes from peasants and herders, decapitated smugglers, and exhorted tolls from caravans. It also contains prison cells for sabbath buggering. The garrison consists of about two hundred troops with a major in command. Since the ayatollahs have gained power, the fort has been used to detain high-ranking members from the shah’s regime while the ayatollahs decide their fate.”

“Who do they have there now?”

Duncan nodded to Charlie Bethune, the CIA chief.

“General Duncan contacted us as he flew out of California. We gave him the data we had on Fort Urbakkan. At present it is holding Bandar Barakat.”

Bandar Barakat! The name resounded off the walls of the Situation Room.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Barakat!”

“Charlie?” the President asked.

“If you can figure Bandar Barakat out, then you can figure out the Middle East. He was one of the top intelligence people under the shah. He smelled the ayatollahs taking power and turned double agent. Because of his Western intelligence contacts, he could still deliver information to the new regime. On our side of the equation, we thought we had buried a valuable mole in the new government. This source of Western intelligence would dry up if they whack off Barakat’s head. So, they imprisoned him and moved him up to Fort Urbakkan, where the VIP prisoner or prisoners are housed in a specific tower.”

The room hummed in admiration at the preciseness of the CIA data.

“Go on, Charlie,” the President said.

“Barakat is probably making like Scheherazade, giving just enough new information to remain alive.”

“What do we want this bastard for?” Admiral Clearfield, chief of Naval Operations, inquired.

“Good question,” Bethune answered. “Barakat had worked his way in Iran

to becoming chief coordinator for terrorist activities. Moreover, the

ayatollahs aren’t going to get rid of him until they find the money

he’s skimmed from the Saudis, who are financing a major part of his

operation. In our hands, Barakat can give us the names of terrorists,

their aliases, cells, organizations, training sites, bank accounts,

future targets being planned—“

“Do you mean to say,” Air Force Commander Hoyt interrupted, “you intend to take him out of this fort?”

“Precisely,” Jeremiah Duncan said.

“How do you know he’ll cooperate?”

“Read my lips .. . MONEY.”

Drawn smiles.

“Believe it or not,” Bethune said, “he still has friends in Western intelligence. That cautiously includes the CIA.”

“How does that figure?”

“He has more money sitting and waiting in the States than in Iran. It includes a prime building on Fifth Avenue. With the ayatollahs breathing down his neck, Barakat has to figure they’ll find and extort his fortune in Iran and Europe. On the other hand, we feel that he’s picked us as the winner and wants to run for it. One more thing, Barakat is an Arab. The Iranians don’t trust Arabs.”

“Are we all on the same page?” the President asked.

“With reservations,” General Bellicek, chair of the Joint Chiefs, noted. “Always with reservations.”

“And you think you can snatch Barakat?” the President asked Jeremiah Duncan.

“I sure as hell like the odds. If he is killed, the raid is still a success. If we spirit him out, we’ve won the lottery.”

“How do you envision this?”

/”~\ “

Quinn.

Click, click.

“Here, we’ve an extended map that includes the NATO base at Tikkah on the Turkish border next to Armenia. We take the SCARAB out of the C-5, unfold the wings and blades, arm it with bombs and missiles we’ve designed, fuel it, and go.”

“Hold it a minute, Jeremiah. Are you suggesting we are going to avoid Iranian radar?” Hoyt of the Air Force asked.

“Yes, in two ways. We’re going to take a page from the Israeli attack on the Egyptians in the Sixty-seven War. The Israelis flew out to the Mediterranean away from Egyptian radar, then came in and attacked them from the rear. We will go back door ourselves. The SCARAB will follow the coast of the Caspian Sea and enter Iran at the Turkoman border.”

“You said there were two reasons.”

“I had this SCARAB prototype built with composites. It is not an all-aluminum plane, and the radar cross section is very low.”

Now came an hour of caution, nitpicking, alternate ideas: we haven’t thoroughly tested the experimental missiles and bombs, the SCARAB has to be refueled in midair, we need a diversionary attack or a carrier hit from the Persian or Oman Gulf ... air cover .. . the condition of the Marine RAM team will be exhaustion after flying fifteen hours .. . and finally:

“No disrespect, Jeremiah,” General Bellicek said, “but aren’t you a little too enamored of those Israeli wing-and-a-prayer raids? They have to win. We have to plan it so as not to take losses.”

“Yeah, but they work,” Duncan retorted, “and the one goddamn reason

they work is because they aren’t cluttered up with all the Yankee bells and whistles. One plane, in and out, twenty fucking Marines.”

“But does the SCARAB have the legs, Jeremiah?” General Hoyt pressed. “You are going to fly under enemy radar in rocky terrain. These are gas-guzzling tactics.”

“/~v “

yumn.

“Yes, sir,” the gunner said. He clicked the carousel forward several slides and spoke. “Using a bad-case scenario, we can reach Fort Urbakkan, pull the raid, and fly out for a few hundred miles. We have called for a fuel tanker from Diego Garcia to rendezvous at thirty-one degrees, forty minutes latitude, fifty eight degrees, twenty minutes longitude. That will give us four hours till daylight to scramble south to the Arabian Sea and land aboard one of our container ships.”

“How many tanker-to-SCARAB refuels have you tried?” Admiral Clearfield asked knowingly.

Duncan looked away, miffed. “Two,” he peeped.

Back and forth, back and forth. It was the kind of plan that made the American military clutch. One mistake would mean a catastrophe. To let go of this opportunity could be a sign of over caution or a fear of casualties. The terrorist would remember an American balk.

Keith Brickhouse, commandant of the Marines, broke his silence. “The PLO, the Iranians, and the rest of those terrorist bastards will increase their activities. They are going to say that America just doesn’t have the capacity to stop them. We are capable of this mission. We will be in and out of there before the muezzin calls the Moslems to prayer in Teheran.”

“And you’ll wish to hell you had had fresh troops going in,” General Hoyt said.

“Fresh troops is an oxymoron,” Duncan answered. “I have never known men to reach battle or who fight battles as fresh troops. Wars are won by men less exhausted.”

Silence. With the specter of American casualties and a failure, the Joint Chiefs and the President were overburdened.

“From time to time, war to war, Americans have shown the utmost ingenuity and courage. Such a time and place is right here now,” the commandant said.

Fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes had elapsed since Iranian terrorists had taken an American Lear jet out of the sky. Overhead a giant C--5 jet transport carrying RAM and its sleeping SCARAB pressed toward the Tikkah Air Base on the far reach of Turkey.

Aboard the C-5 each member of the Recreation and Morale team was issued a packet of maps, personalized for each Marine’s participation in the raid.

The mission and the importance of Bandar Barakat was explained. Jeremiah called for map blowups and went over the plan, minute by minute, inch by inch. Many the day and week they had drilled in specific maneuvering that was now fitted inside the scheme of the raid.

Every Marine had secondary and tertiary duties. All of them could double as corpsmen. Nicknames and personal names only spoken now, no calling a person by his rank. This they had also trained for, and it was hallelujah time when they got to call Major General Jeremiah Duncan “Dogbreath.”

Gunner Quinn O’Connell was the Mayday pilot, bombardier, second backup on the electronic systems, corpsman, and backup navigator behind the pilots.

Grubb, the field commander, and squad leaders Ropo and Marsh, Novinski on electronics, and the pilots, Cherokee and IV, were networked through their helmets to Dogbreath and Quinn.

More intelligence photos. More weather information.

Now a weapons and ammunition check. The twenty Marines were going in with serious firepower.

Duncan snarled time and again, he had pressed the President so hard to make an instant strike, he might have bought a pig in a poke. Would it not have been better to have practiced a virtual raid for a week? They’d find out.

A mere sixteen and a half hours had elapsed since the terrorist attack. The C-5 flew quite close to where the Lear jet’s scattered bits and pieces floated on the waves below.

The plane veered off course, following international waters so as not to fly in an air space where permission would be required.

They did aerobic exercises in the C-5, hard, hard, hard, hard. Major Hugo Grubb was a monster for conditioning. He could make a man’s hand fall off with finger exercises.

Chow included beer! Three per Marine. It would slow down the heart thump, drown out the jumping nerve ends.

One more time they went through a step-by-step account of the coming strike.

Two films were set up, one straight and one porno. By dawn light everyone was in their canvas bunk, dead out, snoring so loud their sound nearly drowned out the jet engines.

NATO AIR BASE’TIKKAH’TURKEY

RAM-A arrived ahead of schedule and was whisked to an isolated hangar, where they were sealed in.

The men stretched, yawned, belched, scratched, and passed air, cracking their bones into alignment. Quickly awake, they unloaded their gear from the C-5 and laid their packs and weapons against a wall.

A hushed moment among the gathering as the SCARAB was rolled down the C-5 ramp. Lord, it looked so small and fragile, an infant being born from the gigantic cargo ship.

The wings had been turned on a pivot for travel, running from tail to cockpit. They were rotated into normal flying mode and clicked in.

Cherokee entered the plane and hit the thumb switch to raise the nacelles housing the engines and propellers. He set them at 75 degrees so the blades would be well clear of the deck. The long and powerful blades had an upside and a downside. Downside, all takeoffs and landings had to be made in helicopter mode. Downside, when firing missiles from under wing racks, they also had to be in helicopter mode. Upside, the plane was hush like quiet in flight and unlikely to be heard by the enemy.

Showers!

Slabs of beef for breakfast with pasta and gallons of orange juice and high-voltage chocolates.

Captain Novinski and his backup man, Master Tech Sergeant Roosevelt Jarvis, entered. They set up a mini display and command console, directly behind the pilots, activated and checked out systems and the display panels.

“SMAC?”

“Pretty as a picture.”

“SMAC locked in.”

“Matching area correlation?”

“A-Okay.” “NOE?” Jarvis checked the digital tracking map system.

Novinski and Jarvis were joined by the chief American navigator at the Tikkah Air Base. The three of them programmed in a flight plan. They activated the terrain-following multifunction radar that would take pulsations from the ground and compare them to their database and display their position to within a hundred feet.

The chief navigator pointed out choppy air corridors, hidden peaks, radar stations, and myriad dangers.

In the radio shack, the pilots received their radio frequencies as well as Russian and Iranian frequencies.

“Fellah?”

“Yo,” Corporal An war Fellah answered, taking a headphone set that

would include him in the command network. “When you get the red light,

it will indicate that we are being contacted by a tower or, God forbid, a fighter plane patrol. If they are speaking in Farsi,” Quinn said, “I’ll signal you to talk to them. Positive of the drill?”

“Gotcha.”

“Volkovitch, the same goes for you in Russian.”

u \

Aye, aye.

Bomb carts rolled in sleek baby missiles. The “Duncan” missiles were short, light, but could penetrate a heavily resistant bunker. At Fort Urbakkan they would be shooting at a mix of mud and stone.

A second set of bombs were little fat ones, murderous against personnel, ugly cluster bombs to shower the enemy with thousands of razor-sharp steel squares and ball bearings.

The nacelles would remain at 75 degrees so the SCARAB could fire from helicopter mode without fear of hitting the propellers. Space under the wing was limited. The laser guidance system looked fine.

The bombing run, in Gunner O’Connell’s hands, had to be executed accurately and surely. To hit the targets dead-on, the SCARAB would be maneuvered as close as possible. Would the hovering SCARAB take Iranian ground fire in this period? Were the bombs squirrely? Could they be held fast during what had to be a wild, shaking flight?

In the rear of the main cabin of the SCARAB an operating table and supplies of blood, surgical tools, and medicines were secured on the ceiling. A pulley rope allowed them to drop easily into place. Dr. Wheat checked over his supplies. Christ, keep the casualties down. The table was again stowed and secured to the roof.

Jeremiah Duncan and his pilots went over the exterior of the SCARAB, an

inspection that lasted an hour and a half. In that time a tanker truck

entered the hangar and filled the plane with fuel. This was a dicey

moment. With this size load and full gas tanks, there was a remote

possibility of fire during takeoff. Jeremiah had spotted the danger

months earlier, and hoped he had beaten the problem with the Bell and Boeing engineers.

“Gentlemen, the SCARAB is ripe!”

The Marines went to their combat packs and weapons, waiting for the command to fall in.

“You will first evacuate your bowels and bladders. No one will be permitted to leave until he takes an airsick pill.”

Groan! Boo!

“You will take the airsick pill because the Marine Corps says you need an airsick pill. Well be riding some nausea-causing waves of air, and we will bounce until your gut humps up into your throats. Puking is not an option, but if you must do so, vomit in your evacuation bags.”

When all had evacuated who could, they fell in near the boarding ramp. Personnel were loaded forward to aft, so Jeremiah did a round of handshakes and entered behind Cherokee and IV.

Directly behind the pilots and a step higher than their heads, Duncan had a mini-console installed. Duncan, with Novinski on one side of him and Quinn on the other, could read a number of displays from it, to monitor the speed, fuel, terrain, communications, as well as the systems that would come into play at the time of their attack.

“Intercom, we all hooked up?”

“Yo, Quinn.”

“Yo, Cherokee.”

“Yo, IV.”

“Yo, Grubb.”

T\

Ropo, on.

“Marsh, yo.”

“Novinski here.”

“All troops present and accounted for, sir.”

The hangar door yawned open. A tow cart inched SCARAB out into the

dying light. With the nacelles at 75 degrees, the SCARAB could be

rolled a short distance on the runway in a fuel-saving maneuver for takeoff as compared to full helicopter thrust.

“Dogbreath, this is Cherokee. Shall we go for a rolling start?”

“This is Dogbreath, let me think. We’ve got a monster load on. Any half-power stunts promulgates six or seven risks I can think of, none of them pleasant. Ninety degrees and full thrust, get this son of a bitch up in the air.”

“Yo.”

Cherokee switched on the engines, a whine and then the SCARAB’s whispering thunder.

“Thrust,” Cherokee ordered.

IV took the long handle to his left and levered it down. The SCARAB hesitated an instant, rose, hung, then popped up.

“We’re at a thousand .. . eleven hundred,” IV said.

“Beep the nacelles down.”

Cherokee’s Fred Astaire feet tickled the rudders as his hand on the joystick held the nose still.

“Nacelles at forty-five degrees.”

“Let’s do some flying .. . but first I want to sing you all a little song.”

Arrayed at the cramped console behind the pilots, Novinski engaged the FLIR to be able to see the ground at night.

Jeremiah and Quinn hovered over the displays depicting Fort Urbakkan’s layout. The fort’s main installations stood three hundred feet down a courtyard next to a headquarters building with radio and telephone capacity. Next to headquarters, an enlisted barracks and mess hall, next the officers quarters. Across the back wall, the supply building and arsenal.

Opposite this, a stable for mules to negotiate the final miles along the cliff-side road to Urbakkan. Then a small prison and punishment court.

Quinn took a radio message and decoded it. THERE IS NO

EVIDENCE OF COMMANDING OFFICER BEING BILLETED IN

MOSQUE.

“That makes the cheese more binding,” Dogbreath said.

Quinn?

“Yo, I read it.”

“Do you think we should save a rack of missiles in case the mosque is armed?” Duncan asked of Quinn.

“No. This intelligence gives us the advantage of entering right over the main gate with no potential enemy able to get behind us. This baby flies so quietly, we’ll make our entrance without being detected. I say we come in and over the main gate, hover and unload our missiles and bombs right down the bowling alley. As soon as the buildings and their munitions go, we come down right alongside Barakat’s tower.”

“Let me think about it,” Dogbreath said. And he did, until his eyes washed out from glaze and concentration.

“Cherokee, this is Dogbreath.”

“Yo.”

“We’re probably going to scratch the mosque as a target. That means we can fly directly over the main gate.”

“No problem.”

“Novinski, this is Dogbreath.”

“Yo,” answered Novinski, sitting next to the general.

“Any of those gadgets give me a reading of how noisy it is outside?”

“Yo,” Novinski said. “Whispering Jesus, singing a lullaby. Under eighty decibels.”

Dogbreath shook his head in amazement. The SCARAB was eight times more quiet in the turbo-prop mode than as a helicopter. Should we make a bombing run or hope that the Iranians are totally off guard? We need a few minutes to get into the fort and for Quinn to squeeze off his missiles. I vote for Quinn.

Dogbreath turned and smiled and waved to RAM in the rear. They sat

knee to knee in hard-ass bucket seats, their combat packs, helmets, and

weapons crammed on the deck in the center aisle. Dogbreath found

something else to fret about: the main cabin was not pressurized, and they’d have to go on oxygen if the SCARAB went high to save fuel.

The first point of the flight was to fly into the northernmost tip of Iran, avoiding Tabriz radar. The SCARAB took to her zigzag preprogrammed course like an old pro. Although the entire mission was made more difficult by mountains, she cruised un excitingly No calls from Tabriz!

Sensing that radar coverage was poor and feeling the SCARAB might not be picked up at all because of her composite materials, Dogbreath ordered her up over the mountaintops to save fuel.

They flew close to plan toward the IranianArmenianAzerbaijan borders.

“Volkovitch and Fellah, this is Dogbreath.”

“Yo.”

“Yo.”

“Are you scanning your frequencies?”

“Fellah here. Tabriz tower is speaking normally. Apparently, they didn’t see us or hear us.”

“Volkovitch?”

“No news from the Russians in Baku.”

“Novinski?”

“Yo?”

“Anybody’s radar suspect we’re up here?”

“Sure doesn’t look like it.”

“Dogbreath to Cherokee and IV. We’re looking very clean. Let’s make a run for the Caspian Sea just south of Arbail,” Dogbreath ordered.

The SCARAB descended as she approached the Caspian Sea and banked right to follow the coast. A high mountain range along the coast would give them cover from inland installations. Intelligence had the mountains well photographed. A dodge here and a twist there would keep them from being spotted.

Those not eating candy bars slept sitting up.

At the Iranian-Turkoman border, Dogbreath ordered the pilots to stay north and cross a deep marsh that would allow them to come around the back door into Iran and give a wide berth around Teheran.

Into a mad swirl of clashing hot and cold winds, the SCARAB chopped and chopped and dropped suddenly, then dropped into a wadi with her tail almost completely whipped around. Cherokee quickly took her off automatic pilot.

The craft was sorely protesting her load and altitude.

“Novinski, this is Cherokee, how is your terrain following?”

“We’re in a tight-ass valley. The cross winds are too crazy. We may not be getting accurate readings,” Novinski said.

“I’m going visual. You stay on the multifunction radar,” Cherokee said.

“Yo,” IV said.

Cherokee put on his night-vision goggles, whispered an “Oh, Jesus.”

“I’m going up a thousand feet and clear that ridge.”

That ridge didn’t want to be cleared, hurtling wind into chainsaw mountaintops. Debris spewed up, some of it pelting the SCARAB.

“Shit!” Novinski noted as the bottom fell out on the far side of the ridge. Another roller-coaster wadi compelled Cherokee and IV to fly by the seat of their pants.

During the violent weather and turbulence, Dogbreath kept his mind on his display panels, unaware of the tension about him.

Should I have taken a spare pilot from El Toro? Damned, how could I? We only have a total of twenty men with arms. Marginal, marginal, well, hell, can’t do anything about it now. What’s that? he asked himself as perspiration beaded over his forehead. Goddammit, I should have taken an airsick pill. I cannot puke in front of these people!

“Quinn, this is Dogbreath.”

“Yo.”

“We’ve scratched the mosque as a target, so let’s examine your frontal assault plan.”

SCARAB dropped into a long, flat valley, and the air became dirty, woefully dirty. Quinn looked back and saw RAM tossed up and down, like a film with broken threads. Yelps!

“Congratulations, men,” Cherokee said, switching on the loudspeaker system, “we made it again.”

Quinn gave a fuel reading to IV. The bitch was drinking up too many calories. IV fine-tuned the angle of the prop blades.

“Quinn to front cabin. We’re cleared of Teheran radar.”

“Dogbreath to Cherokee.”

“Yo.”

“We’re using up too much fuel. It is touch and go if we can reach the tanker plane or not. Since we’re cleared of major radar and there are no patrols in the area, shut down the terrain follower and take her up to twenty thousand and look for some smooth air.”

“I’ll see if I can run into a tailwind going our way,” Cherokee said.

“Attention, all hands,” Dogbreath said. “We will be climbing, looking for better air. Prepare your oxygen masks for deployment over your ugly faces.”

Bad time for humor. The rear cabin looked like carcasses hanging from hooks in a butcher’s freezer.

SCARAB climbed happily.

“Satellite report coming in,” Quinn said. “A few commercial flights to and from Teheran.”

lime?

“We are sixteen minutes behind.”

“Here we go,” Cherokee sang as his engine mellowed, caught a tailwind, and lifted her speed to a respectable five hundred subsonic knots per hour. . Dogbreath’s head nodded as he joined his men snapping out a thirty-second nap.

“Novinski, this is Dogbreath.”

“Yo.”

“What will the wind be doing at twelve thousand?”

“One-forty at twenty-three knots, but definitely swirling over Urbakkan.”

He clicked on the SCARAB’s loudspeaker. “This is Dogbreath. The wind doth bloweth, too strong and from iffy directions. I’d like your input. We scratched napalm as one of our ordnance and replaced it with phosphorous. We are now considering the idea of a direct courtyard landing after dispensing missiles and bombs. If we drop a phosphorous curtain, as we have practiced, we will have to fly out and circle the fort. I likewise fear that the courtyard mud might be flammable, and a fuck-up wind shift send the fire right back at us. Of course, the phosphorous could well insure our success ... if it goes perfectly.”

“This is Grubb. I don’t like working with fire, it doesn’t

cooperate.”

“Novinski here. How about something like this: ditch the phosphorous about ten miles downwind from the fort. It will save us nearly seven hundred pounds.”

“This is Quinn. Can’t ditch it all. We need some to have flare capacity when we rendezvous with the tanker plane.”

“IV.”

“Yo.”

“No phosphorous drop. If we light up the fort too soon, it could give the Irans several minutes to organize. We may need the flares on the way home.”

“Yo” confirmations. Dogbreath pulled down his night-vision goggles and peered from one display panel to another. The phosphorous was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if you-don’t decision. “What character this plane has,” he thought. “If we come through this, it will be a big player in the Marine Corps’ future. How do you feel, Jeremiah Duncan?” he asked himself. “Pretty good, I believe we’ve got everything covered.”

“Attention, all hands, this is Dogbreath. We are making a variation of the landing. We will not make passes over the fort but fire our artillery from the hover position, then drop right into the courtyard. Marsh, Ropo,” he said, calling the squad leaders.

“Yo.”

“Yo.”

“This is Dogbreath. We will pick up twenty minutes, and Cherokee will reduce speed so that we hit our target precisely on the minute.”

H-hour minus twelve minutes .. . eleven minutes.

“All hands, check your weapons, ammo clips, and gear. Do not carry anything out of the SCARAB you can’t shoot or eat or wipe your ass with. Keep your oxygen masks on until you debark.”

H-hour minus seven minutes.

The front cabin people were all wearing night-vision goggles, and the FLIR gave a pretty picture of what was passing beneath them.

“Jesus!” Dogbreath thought. “What if we just put the SCARAB down in the courtyard and loudspeaker to the Iranians that we are an Iranian plane dispatched to take Barakat away to Teheran! No ... if we landed and set up a perimeter, we’d get into a nasty fire fight when they caught on. No, we’ve got to knock out our targets. But what an idea! Never will get a chance at it... Okay, Dogbreath, scratch that one ..

.”

H-hour minus three minutes.

Holy shit, Mother McGee! IV saw it first in the sallow green, grainy glow that lit up their screen. Further glows flashed on the display panels.

“The minaret is sticking up like the hard-on I had this morning,” Cherokee said. “IV, start lifting the nacelles.”

“Forty-five .. . fifty .. . sixty .. . seventy-five .. .”

“Nothing moving down there, Dogbreath,” Novinski said.

A slight engine and propeller thump was smoothed by Cherokee’s hand.

“We are in helicopter mode,” IV said.

“This is Dogbreath. Quinn?”

Quinn O’Connell took a reading from his display screen, then locked on to the far end of the courtyard with a laser beam. Its light could not be seen by the Iranians. There it is! The communications tower. The beam further lit up the installation buildings.

“I am locked on the headquarters building and need minimal adjustments to target officers billet and enlisted barracks. Give me ten seconds between racks.”

“Jesus,” Dogbreath said softly, “they’re all asleep down there.”

“Cherokee, this is Quinn. Take her up another few hundred feet so I can get a better visual.”

“Rotors at eighty-five degrees. We are in helicopter mode.”

As the SCARAB drifted over the fort wall, Quinn’s fingers unlocked the bomb-rack releases. If Dogbreath’s bombs were working, they’d follow the laser beam into the target.

Quinn squeezed the bomb release. “God forgive me,” he whispered. Even as the missiles hurled down on the first sleeping target, he had lined up his second target.

Everything turned into slow motion, as if moving in a dream—clouds billowed, thunder, blinding light, and madly careening air.

The pulsating waves of air billowed before a stiff wind.

“Quinn, this is Cherokee. Hold your second rack. I’m taking her up some or we’ll start shaking like a dog shitting peach seeds.”

“Yo.”

The SCARAB caught the tail end of the blast, and it shook her. Little bits of the mud buildings sent up a shower of debris, pelting the craft.

“This is Quinn. I’m locked on the arsenal.”

“This is Cherokee. I need another minute and a half—“

“Novinski, this is Dogbreath. Can you confirm that there is only a little panic activity near the installations?”

“Novinski to Dogbreath. They’re running around in circles, not even armed.”

“Cherokee to Quinn. You are free to release the balance of your racks.”

“Two fired .. . three fired .. . four fired.”

Fort Urbakkan jumped and rocked and broke apart, leveled to the ground, a deep hole gouged from the site of the arsenal.

One end of the courtyard filled up with pajama-clad, screaming, kneeling, quivering men, like ants trying to scurry from boiling water.

“Novinski, Quinn, IV ... how many Irans down there?”

“Fifty, maybe more.”

“They’re still climbing out of the rubble. Seventy-five,” Quinn reckoned.

“I’d say fifty,” IV said.

For the first time since the mission began, Dogbreath blinked. He froze time to get the words out of him .. . “Dogbreath to Quinn. Fire all cluster bombs.”

The scene below became a horror of Irans being showered with hundreds of thousands of razor bits of steel and exploding ball bearings.

“Dogbreath to Cherokee. Land her as far away from those people as we can and as close to that tower as we can get.”

Aye, aye.

“Attention, all hands, this is Dogbreath. We are descending to land.

It appears that we have neutralized our primary targets.”

The RAM people were so glad to be getting out of the SCARAB, they forgot fear for the moment. The plane touched down softly, sending up a small billow of dust. Ramp down!

<(T , t \

Lets go!

Twenty Marines poured out at high port and split off. Marsh’s squad made for the tower while Grubb set up a perimeter in front of the SCARAB. Meeting no opposition, Grubb moved his men carefully down the courtyard.

They saw the enemy! Survivors crawling out of the rubble some fell to their knees and pleaded not to be killed while others held up white flags of surrender.

“Grubb to Dogbreath.”

“Yo.”

“I’ve got maybe forty, fifty Irans trying to surrender.”

Dogbreath grunted, about to give an order to kill them. There were no contingency plans for prisoners. Unless we take them down, they might organize for a suicide charge ... a couple of lucky shots and the SCARAB could be hit in a vital spot.

“Dogbreath to Grubb. Have your people fire over their heads and advance down yard. Try to herd them back into the far end. If and only if you detect hostile gunfire or they make any gesture toward us, cut them down.”

The Marines moved their perimeter a bit farther, then a bit farther.

The raid had reached its critical moments. It was going too smoothly, Jeremiah thought. Nothing can shoot and maneuver like this! First blip. An Iranian machine-gun squad was creeping atop the west wall. Grubb ordered his night-vision, shoulder firing TOW gunner to lay one on. He did. Out in the courtyard the Irans seemed to get the RAM communication and backpedaled.

Moment of truth.

“Dogbreath to Ropo. What’s going on?”

“Ropo, can’t talk.”

Dogbreath now tensed from the torture of not knowing if Bandar Barakat had been located and was alive.

Ropo crept up a circular staircase that must have been built for midgets. His team struggled behind him like a toy train taking a sharp curve. Muffle the fucking grunts!

Ropo’s hand reached for the next step. No step there. He patted the

floor. He had reached a landing. Ropo wormed himself onto it in a

sitting position, back against the wall; he held his gun at the ready

and flicked on a flashlight to locate the apartment door. He felt a

presence. Ropo looked up to see a fat man standing over him with a pistol a few inches from his head, and caught a glimpse of the man’s face as the flashlight was kicked from his hands. Barakat!

The man said something in Farsi.

“Barakat,” Ropo said loudly, “if you shoot me, you’re dead.”

“Israelis?” asked the fat man.

“We’re from Mars,” Ropo answered, tempted to grab Barakat’s ankles and dump him.

The conversation could be heard over the command network. Those in the SCARAB sweated. The Marine below Ropo had inched to the platform but could see next to nothing. Barakat’s uneven breath became ponderous.

“Where are your guards?” Ropo asked.

“I shot them the instant I heard the bombs.”

“Can I turn on my flashlight and talk?”

The Marine behind Ropo shined a light into Barakat’s face. Ropo slammed his forearm into Barakat’s knee, sending him crashing. He fired.

“Oh, God, no!” Duncan whispered as he heard the report of the bullet.

“We’ve got him! We’ve got him. We’ll be back in seven or eight minutes.”

Jeremiah Duncan allowed himself to decompress for the first time since receiving orders to fly to Washington. No joy, no elation, no sense of final victory. Duncan, a religious man when unseen by others, nodded to God in thanks for seeing things his way this time. Novinski, Quinn, and IV reached over and squeezed his shoulder. Jeremiah accepted the touch, hunched his shoulders, and cracked his neck.

The old Marine allowed himself a moment of self-satisfaction. Jesus, he thought, all the years of planning, how many years? Forty?

Planning maneuvers, raids, battles, campaigns. Now at last was a

close-to-perfect operation. At least, up to this point. It seemed

like something went always awry after the first shots were exchanged,

and it usually boiled down to every Marine improvising with the man on his left and right to win their piece of turf. This was sublime!

“Quinn to Novinski. What kind of read can you get on your display of the courtyard?”

“Novinski here. Marsh’s squad at ten o’clock from west wall to one-third of courtyard. Grubb’s people making a move back toward SCARAB. Separation between Marines and Irans is at least sixty yards. Hold it, hold everything, something’s lying on the deck about twenty yards behind Marsh’s squad.”

“What?”

“Quinn to Dogbreath! I see it, too! Unexploded bomb!”

“This is Grubb. I see it loud and clear.”

“Dogbreath to Grubb. Can you read the stripes?”

“Black and blue, a cluster bomb!”

“Dogbreath to Grubb. Stop! You are ordered not to throw yourself on that bomb. It won’t help. Pull Marsh’s squad back, dump your ammo and missiles as planned for weight reduction. Marsh.”

“Marsh here.”

“Cover Ropo’s and Grubb’s people. Do not, repeat, do not fire near that grounded bomb, but keep those Irans pinned back. Allow no forward movement.”

“Marsh here. I’ve got it.”

Half of Grubb’s squad ditched their ammo clips, laid their missiles down, and ran up the ramp. They had to jam their way around the operating table and dispensary that had been lowered from the ceiling.

Ropo’s five-man squad burst out of the tower dragging a dumpy captive whose legs would not keep up. Into the plane! Marsh pulled his men back .. . back .. .

“Dogbreath to Grubb. We’ve got the fat man. Keep bringing your people back, but softly and at the ready.”

Gunfire cracked and echoed throughout the yard. Either some Irans had regrouped, or maybe there was a patrol outside the fort that had rushed back.

“Dogbreath to Grubb. Barrage them with TOWs. Do not! Do not fire near that bomb laying out there.” As the missiles zipped and struck, the end of the yard choked in blood and agony.

Bandar Barakat was shoved forward toward the front cabin, tied and gagged. Grubb and Marsh remained outside of the SCARAB as their men went up the ramp.

Jeremiah Duncan looked it all over quickly, seized Quinn’s arm. “If anything happens to me, it’s your command, Quinn.”

Quinn protested. “Don’t like it.”

Dogbreath repeated, “Yea or nay?”

“This is Quinn. I’ll do it.”

“Dogbreath to Cherokee and IV.”

“Yo.”

“Yo.”

“Prepare the SCARAB to go.”

Aye, aye.