Line of Control

SEVENTY

Paul Hood sat alone in his office. He was looking at his computer, reviewing the comments he planned to make at the ten A.M. Striker memorial.

As promised, Herbert had persuaded the Indians to bring choppers from the line of control to collect the bodies of the Strikers. The leverage he used was simple. The Pakistanis agreed to stay out of the region, even though they claimed the valley for their own. Herbert convinced New Delhi that it would be a bad idea for Pakistanis to collect the bodies of Americans who had been killed by Indians. It would have made a political statement that neither India nor the United States wished to make.

Colonel August was in the valley to meet the two Mi-35s when they arrived late Friday afternoon. The bodies had already been collected and lined up beneath their canopies. August stayed with the bodies until they had been flown back to Quantico on Sunday. Then and only then did the colonel agree to go to a hospital. Mike Rodgers was there to meet him.

Hood and Rodgers had performed too many of these services since Op-Center had first been chartered. Mike Rodgers inevitably spoke eloquently of duty and soldiering. Heroism and tradition. Hood always tried to find a perspective in which to place the sacrifice. The salvation of a country, the saving of lives, or the prevention of war. The men invariably left the mourners feeling hope instead of futility, pride to temper the sense of loss.

But this was different. More than the lives of the Strikers was being memorialized today.

New Delhi had publicly thanked Op-Center for uncovering a Pakistani cell. The bodies of three terrorists had been found at the foot of the Himachal Peaks in the Himalayas. They appeared to have slipped from a ledge and plummeted to their deaths. They were identified by records on file at the offices of the Special Frontier Force.

Islamabad had also publicly thanked Op-Center for helping deter a nuclear strike against Pakistan. Though Indian Defense Minister John Kabir had been named by Major Dev Puri and others as the man behind the plot, Kabir denied the allegations. He vowed to fight any indictments the government might consider handing down. Hood suspected that the minister and others would resign, and that would be the end of it. New Delhi would rather bury the reality of any wrongdoing than give Pakistan a more credible voice in the court of world opinion.

Hood even got a thank-you call from Nanda Kumar. The young woman called from New Delhi to say that General Rodgers had been a hero and a gentleman. Although he had not been able to save her grandfather, she realized that Rodgers had done everything he could to make the trek easier for him. She said she hoped to visit Hood and Rodgers in Washington when she got out of the hospital. Even though she was technically an Indian intelligence operative, Hood had no doubt that she would get a visa. Nanda's broadcast had made her an international celebrity. She would spend the rest of her life speaking and writing about her experience. Hood hoped that the twenty-two-year-old was wise beyond her years. He hoped she would use the media access to promote tolerance and peace in Kashmir, and not the agendas of India or Nanda Kumar.

The praise from abroad was unique. Even when Op-Center succeeded in averting disaster, Hood and his team were typically slammed for their involvement in the internal affairs of another nation — Spain or the Koreas or the Middle East or anywhere else they handled a crisis.

Despite the praise coming from abroad, Op-Center took several unprecedented hits on the home front. Most of those came from Hank Lewis and the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee. They wanted to know why General Rodgers had left the Siachin Glacier without Ron Friday. Why Striker had jumped into a military hot zone during the day instead of at night. Why the NRO was involved in the operation but not the CIA or the full resources of the NSA, which had an operative on-site. Hood and Rodgers had gone over to Capitol Hill to explain everything to Lewis and to Fox and her fellow CIOC members.

They might just as well have been speaking Urdu. The CIOC had already decided that in addition to the previously discussed downsizing, Op-Center would no longer be maintaining a military wing. Striker would be officially disbanded. Colonel August and Corporal Musicant would be reassigned and General Rodgers's role would be "reevaluated."

Hood was also informed that he would be filing daily rather than semiweekly reports with CIOC. They wanted to know everything that the agency was involved with, from situation analyses to photographic reconnaissance.

Hood suspected the only thing that protected Op-Center at all was the loyalty of the president of the United States. President Lawrence and United Nations Secretary-General Mala Chatterjee had issued a joint statement congratulating Paul Hood for his group's nonpartisan efforts on behalf of humanitarianism and world peace. It was not a document the CIOC could ignore, especially after Chatterjee's bitter denunciation of the way Hood had handled the Security Council crisis. Hood could not imagine the kind of pressure Lawrence must have applied to get that statement. He also wondered how Chatterjee really felt. She was a pacifistic Indian whose nation had tried to start a nuclear war against its neighbor. Unless she was steeped in denial, that had to be difficult for her to reconcile. Hood would not be surprised to hear that she was resigning her post to run for political office at home. That would certainly be a good step toward peace in the region.

All of which served to make this a very different time, a very different memorial service. It was the last time Paul Hood and the original Op-Center would do anything as teammates. The rest of them would not know that yet.

But Paul Hood would. He wanted to say something that addressed a new loss they would all soon be feeling.

He reread the opening line of his testimonial.

"This is the second family I have lost in as many months…"

He deleted it. The statement was too much about him. Too much about his loss.

But it did start him thinking. Although he was no longer living with Sharon and the kids, he still felt as though they were together in some way. If not physically then spiritually.

And then it came to him. Hood knew the line was right because it caught in his throat as he tried to say it.

Hood typed with two trembling index fingers as he tried to see the computer monitor. It was blurry because he was blinking out tears over what was supposed to be just a job.

"This I have learned," he wrote with confidence. "Wherever fate takes any of us, we will always be family… "