Without Remorse

CHAPTER 11

Fabrication

Five miles can be a long walk. It is always a long swim. It is a particularly long swim alone. It was an especially long swim alone and for the first time in weeks. That fact became clear to Kelly before the halfway point, but even though the water east of his island was shallow enough that he could stand in many places, he didn't stop, didn't allow himself to slacken off. He altered his stroke to punish his left side all the more, welcoming the pain as the messenger of progress. The water temperature was just about right, he told himself, cool enough that be didn't overheat, and warm enough that it didn't drain the energy from his body. Half a mile out from the island his pace began to slow, but he summoned the inner reservoir of whatever it was that a man drew on and gutted it out, building the pace up again until, when he touched the mud that marked the eastern side of Battery Island, he could barely move. Instantly his muscles began to tighten up, and Kelly had to force himself to stand and walk. It was then that he saw the helicopter. He'd heard one twice during his swim, but made no note of it. He had long experience with helicopters, and hearing them was as natural as the buzz of an insect. But having one land on his sandbar was not all that common, and he walked over towards it until a voice called him back towards the bunkers.

'Over here, Chief'

Kelly turned. The voice was familiar, and on rubbing his eyes he saw the undress whites of a very senior naval officer - that fact made clear by the golden shoulder boards that sparkled in the late-morning sun.

'Admiral Maxwell!' Kelly was glad for the company, especially this man, but his lower legs were covered in mud from the walk out of the water. 'I wish you'd called ahead, sir.'

'I tried, Kelly.' Maxwell came up to him and took his hand. 'We've been calling here for a couple of days. Where the hell were you? Out on a job?' The Admiral was surprised at the instant change in the boy's face.

'Not exactly.'

'Why don't you go get washed off? I'll go looking for a soda.' It was then that Maxwell saw the recent scars on Kelly's back and neck. Jesus!

Their first meeting had been aboard USS Kitty Hawk, three years earlier, he as AirPac, Kelly as a very sick Bosun's Mate First Class. It wasn't the sort of thing a man in Maxwell's position could forget. Kelly had gone in to rescue the flight crew of Nova One One, whose pilot had been Lieutenant, junior grade, Winslow Holland Maxwell III, USN. Two days of crawling about in an area that was just too hot for a rescue helicopter to go trolling, and he'd come out with Dutch 3rd, injured but alive, but Kelly had caught a vicious infection from the putrid water. And how, Maxwell still asked himself, how did you thank a man for saving your only son? So young he'd looked in the hospital bed, so much like his son, the same sort of defiant pride and shy intelligence. In a just world Kelly would have received the Medal of Honor for his solo mission up that brown river, but Maxwell hadn't even wasted the paper. Sorry, Dutch, CINCPAC would have said, I'd like to go to bat for you on this, but it's a waste of effort, just would look too, well, suspicious. And so he'd done what he could.

'Tell me about yourself.'

'Kelly, sir, John?., bosun's mate first -'

'No.' Maxwell had interrupted him with a shake of the head. 'No, I think you look more like a Chief Bosun's Mate to me.'

Maxwell had stayed on Kitty Hawk for three more days, ostensibly to conduct a personal inspection of flight operations, but really to keep an eye on his wounded son and the young SEAL who'd rescued him. He'd been with Kelly for the telegram announcing the death of his father, a firefighter who'd had a heart attack on the job. And now, he realized, he'd arrived just after something else.

Kelly returned from his shower in a T-shirt and shorts, dragging a little physically, but with something tough and strong in his eyes.

'How far was that swim, John?'

'Just under five miles, sir.'

'Good workout,' Maxwell observed, handing over a Coca-Cola for his host. 'You better cool down some.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'What happened to you? That mess on your shoulder is new.' Kelly told his story briefly, in the way of one warrior to another, for despite the difference in age and station they were of a kind, and for the second time Dutch Maxwell sat and listened like the surrogate father he had become.

'That's a hard hit, John,' the Admiral observed quietly.

'Yes, sir.' Kelly didn't know what else he was supposed to say, and looked down for a moment. 'I never thanked you for the card... when Tish died. That was good of you, sir. How's your son doing?'

'Flying a 727 for Delta. I'm going to be a grandfather any day now,' the Admiral said with satisfaction, then he realized how cruel the addition might have seemed to this young, lonely man.

'Great!' Kelly managed a smile, grateful to hear something good, that something he'd done had come to a successful conclusion. 'So what brings you out here, sir?'

'I want to go over something with you.' Maxwell opened his portfolio and unfolded the first of several maps on Kelly's coffee table.

The younger man grunted. 'Oh, yeah, I remember this place.' His eyes lingered on some symbols that were hand-sketched in. 'Classified information here, sir.'

'Chief, what we're going to talk about is very sensitive.'

Kelly turned to look around. Admirals always traveled around with aides, usually a shiny young lieutenant who would carry the official briefcase, show his boss where the head was, fuss over where the car was parked, and generally do the things beneath the dignity of a hard-working chief petty officer. Suddenly he realized that although the helicopter had its flight crew, now wandering around outside, Vice Admiral Maxwell was otherwise alone, and that was most unusual.

'Why me, sir?'

'You're the only person in the country who's seen this area from ground level.'

'And if we're smart, we'll keep it that way.' Kelly's memories of the place were anything but pleasant. Looking at the two-dimensional map instantly brought bad three-dimensional recollections.

'How far did you go up the river, John?'

'About to here.' Kelly's hand wandered across the map. 'I missed your son on the first sweep so I doubled back and found him right about here.'

And that wasn't bad, Maxwell thought, tantalizingly close to the objective. 'This highway bridge is gone. Only took us sixteen missions, but it's in the river now.'

'You know what that means, don't you? They build a ford, probably, or a couple underwater bridges. You want advice on taking those out?'

'Waste of time. The objective is here.' Maxwell's finger tapped a spot marked with red pen.

'That's a long way to swim, sir. What is it?'

'Chief, when you retired you checked the box for being in the Fleet Reserve,' Maxwell said benignly.

'Hold on, sir!'

'Relax, son, I'm not recalling you.' Yet, Maxwell thought. 'You had a top-secret clearance.'

'Yeah, we all did, because of -'

'This stuff is higher than TS, John.' And Maxwell explained why, pulling additional items from his portfolio.

'Those motherfuckers...' Kelly looked up from the recon photo. 'You want to go in and get them out, like Song Tay?'

'What do you know about that?'

'Just what was in the open,' Kelly explained. 'We talked it around the group. It sounded like a pretty slick job. Those Special Forces guys can be real clever when they work at it. But -'

'Yeah, but there was nobody home. This guy'- Maxwell tapped the photo - 'is positively ID'd as an Air force colonel. Kelly, you can never repeat this.'

'I understand that, sir. How do you plan to do it?'

'We're not sure yet. You know something about the area, and we want your information to help look at alternatives.'

Kelly thought back. He'd spent fifty sleepless hours in the area. 'It would be real hairy for a helo insertion. There's a lot of triple-A there. The nice thing about Song Tay, it wasn't close to anything, but this place is close enough to Haiphong, and you have these roads and stuff. This is a tough one, sir.'

'Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.'

'If you loop around here, you can use this ridge-line to mask your approach, but you have to hop the river somewhere... here, and you run into that flak trap... and that one's even worse, 'cording to these notations.'

'Did SEALs plan air missions over there, Chief?' Maxwell asked, somewhat amused, only to be surprised at the reply.

'Sir, 3rd SOG was always short of officers. They kept getting shot up. I was the group operations officer for two months, and we all knew how to plan insertions. We had to, that was the most dangerous part of most missions. Don't take this wrong, sir, but even enlisted men know how to think.'

Maxwell bristled a little. 'I never said they didn't.'

Kelly managed a grin. 'Not all officers are as enlightened as you are, sir.' He looked back down at the map. 'You plan this sort of thing backwards. You start with what do you need on the objective, then you backtrack to find out how you get it all there.'

'Save that for later. Tell me about the river valley,' Maxwell ordered.

Fiftyhours, Kelly remembered, picked up from Danang by helo, deposited aboard the submarine USS Skate, which then had moved Kelly right into the surprisingly deep estuary of that damned stinking river, fighting his way up against the current behind an electrically powered sea-scooter, which was still there, probably, unless some fisherman had snagged a line on it, staying underwater until his air tanks gave out, and he remembered how frightening it was not to be able to hide under the rippled surface. When he couldn't do that, when it had been too dangerous to move, hiding under weeds on the bank, watching traffic move on the river road, hearing the ripping thunder of the flak batteries on the hilltops, wondering what some 37mm fire could do to him if some North Vietnamese boy scout stumbled across him and let his father know. And now this flag officer was asking him how to risk the lives of other men in the same place, trusting him, much as Pam had, to know what to do. That sudden thought chilled the retired chief bosun's mate.

'It's not a really nice place, sir. I mean, your son saw a lot of it, too.'

'Not from your perspective,' Maxwell pointed out.

And that was true, Kelly remembered. Little Dutch had bellied up in a nice thick place, using his radio only on alternate hours, waiting for Snake to come and fetch him while he nursed a broken leg in silent agony, and listened to the same triple-A batteries that had splashed his A-6 hammer the sky at other men trying to take out the same bridge that his own bombs had missed. Fifty hours, Kelly remembered, no rest, no sleep, just fear and the mission.

'How much time, sir?'

'We're not sure. Honestly, I'm not sure if we can get the mission green-lighted. When we have a plan, then we can present it. When it's approved, we can assemble assets, and train, and execute.'

'Weather considerations?' Kelly asked.

'The mission has to go in the fall, this fall, or maybe it'll never go.'

'You say these guys will never come back unless we get them?'

'No other reason for them to set this place up in the way they did,' Maxwell replied.

'Admiral, I'm pretty good, but I'm just an enlisted guy, remember?'

'You're the only person who's been close to the place.' The Admiral collected the photographs and the maps. He handed Kelly a fresh set of the latter. 'You turned down OCS three times. I'd like to know why, John.'

'You want the truth? It would have meant going back. I pushed my luck enough.'

Maxwell accepted that at face value, silently wishing that his best source of local information had accumulated the rank to match his expertise, but Maxwell also remembered flying combat missions off the old Enterprise with enlisted pilots, at least one of whom had displayed enough savvy to be an air-group commander, and he knew that the best helicopter pilots around were probably the instant Warrant Officers the Army ran through Fort Rucker. This wasn't the time for a wardroom mentality.

'One mistake from Song Tay,' Kelly said after a moment.

'What's that?'

'They probably overtrained. After a certain period of time, you're just dulling the edge. Pick the right people, and a couple of weeks, max, will handle it. Go further than that and you're just doing embroidery.'

'You're not the first person to say that,' Maxwell assured him.

'Will this be a SEAL job?'

'We're not sure yet. Kelly, I can give you two weeks while we work on other aspects of the mission.'

'How do I get in touch, sir?'

Maxwell dropped a Pentagon pass on the table. 'No phones, no mail, it's all face-to-face contact.'

Kelly stood and walked him out to the helicopter. As soon as the Admiral came into view, the flight crew started lighting up the turbine engines on the SH-2 SeaSprite. He grabbed the Admiral's arm as the rotor started turning.

'Was the Song Tay job burned?'

That stopped Maxwell in his tracks. 'Why do you ask?'

Kelly nodded. 'You just answered my question, Admiral.'

'We're not sure, Chief.' Maxwell ducked his head under the rotor and got into the back of the helicopter. As it lifted off, he found himself wishing again that Kelly had taken the invitation to officer-candidate school. The lad was smarter than he'd realized, and the Admiral made a note to look up his former commander for a fuller evaluation. He also wondered what Kelly would do on his formal recall to active duty. It seemed a shame to betray the boy's trust - it might be seen that way to him, Maxwell thought as the Sea-Sprite turned and headed northwest - but his mind and soul lingered with the twenty men believed to be in sender green, and his first loyalty had to be to them. Besides, maybe Kelly needed the distraction from his personal troubles. The Admiral consoled himself with that thought.

Kelly watched the helo disappear into the forenoon haze. Then he walked towards his machine shop. He'd expected that by this time today his body would be hurting and his mind relaxed. Strangely, the reverse was now true. The exercise at the hospital had paid off more handsomely than he'd dared to hope. There was still a problem with stamina, but his shoulder, after the usual start-up pain, had accepted the abuse with surprisingly good grace, and now having passed through the customary post-exercise agony, the secondary period of euphoria had set in. He'd feel good all day, Kelly expected, though he'd hit the bed early tonight in anticipation of yet another day's punishing exercise, and tomorrow he'd take a watch and start exercising in earnest by rating himself against the clock. The Admiral had given him two weeks. That was about the time he'd given to himself for his physical preparation. Now it was time for another sort.

Naval stations, whatever their size and purpose, were all alike. There were some things they all had to have. One of these was a machine shop. For six years there had been crashboats stationed at Battery Island, and to support them, there had to be machine tools to repair and fabricate broken machine parts. Kelly's collection of tools was the rough equivalent of what would be found on a destroyer, and had probably been purchased that way, the Navy Standard Mark One Mod Zero machine shop selected straight out of some service catalog. Maybe even the Air Force had the same thing for all he knew. He switched on a South Bend milling machine and began checking its various parts and oil reservoirs to make sure it would do what he wanted.

Attendant to the machine were numerous hand tools and gauges and drawers full of various steel blanks, just roughly machined metal shapes intended for further manufacturing into whatever specific purpose a technician might need. Kelly sat on a stool to decide exactly what he needed, then decided that he needed something else first. He took down the.45 automatic from its place on the wall, unloaded and disassembled it before giving the slide and barrel a very careful look inside and out.

'You're going to need two of everything,' Kelly said to himself. But first things first. He set the slide on a sturdy jig and used the milling machine first of all to drill two small holes in the top of the slide. -The South Bend machine made an admirably efficient drill, not even a tenth of a turn on the four-handled wheel and the tiny cutting bit lanced through the ordnance steel of the automatic. Kelly repeated the exercise, making a second hole 1.25 inches from the first. Tapping the holes for threads was just as easy, and a screwdriver completed the exercise. That ended the easy part of the day's work and got him used to operating the machine, something he hadn't done in over a year. A final examination of the modified gun slide assured Kelly that he hadn't hurt anything. It was now time for the tricky part.

He didn't have the time or equipment to do a really proper job. He knew how to use a welding set well enough, but lacked the gear to fabricate the special parts needed for the sort of instrument he would have liked to have. To do that would mean going to a small foundry whose artisans might have guessed what he was up to, and that was something he could not risk. He consoled himself with the thought that good enough was good enough, while perfect was always a pain in the ass and often not worth the effort anyway.

First he got a sturdy steel blank, rather like a can, but narrower and with thicker walls. Again he drilled and tapped a hole, this time in the center of the bottom plate, axial with the body of the 'can,' as he already thought of it. The hole was.60 inches in diameter, something he had already checked with a pair of calipers. There were seven similar blanks, but of lesser outside diameter. These he cut off to a length of three quarters of an inch before drilling holes in their bottoms. These new holes were.24 inches, and the shapes he ended up with were like small cups with holes in the bottom, or maybe diminutive flowerpots with vertical sides, he thought with a smile. Each of these was a 'baffle.' He tried to slide the baffles into the 'can,' but they were too wide. That earned Kelly a grumble at himself. Each baffle had to go on his lathe. This he did, trimming down the outside of each to a shiny, uniform diameter exactly one millimeter less than that of the inside of the can, a lengthy operation that had him swearing at himself for the fifty minutes it required. Finished, finally, he rewarded himself with a cold Coke before sliding the baffles inside the can. Agreeably, they all fit snugly enough that they didn't rattle, but loosely enough that they slid out with only a shake or two. Good. He dumped them out and next machined a cover cap for the can, which had to be threaded as well. Finished with that task, he first screwed it into place with the baffles out, and then with the baffles in, congratulating himself for the tight fit of all the parts - before he realized that he hadn't cut a hole in the cover plate, which he had to do next, again with the milling machine. This hole was a scant.23 inches in diameter, but when he was done he could see straight through the entire assembly. At least he'd managed to drill everything straight.

Next came the important part. Kelly took his time setting up the machine, checking the arrangements no less than five times before doing the last tapping operation with one pull on the operating handle - that after a long breath. This was something he'd observed a few times but never actually done himself, and though he was pretty good with tools, he was a retired bosun, not a machinist's mate. Finished, he dismounted the barrel and reassembled the pistol, heading outside with a box of.22 Long Rifle ammunition.

Kelly had never been intimidated by the large, heavy Colt automatic, but the cost of.45 ACP was far higher than that of.22 rimfire cartridges, and so the previous year he'd purchased a conversion kit allowing the lighter rounds to be fired through the pistol. He tossed the Coke can about fifteen feet before loading three rounds in the magazine. He didn't bother with ear protection. He stood as he always did, relaxed, hands at his sides, then brought the gun up fast, dropping into a crouching two-hand stance. Kelly stopped cold, realizing that the can screwed onto the barrel blanked out his sights. That would be a problem. The gun went back down, then came up again, and Kelly squeezed off the first round without actually seeing the target. With the predictable results: when he looked, the can was untouched. That was the bad news. The good news was that the suppressor had functioned well. Often misrepresented by TV and movie sound editors into an almost musical zing, the noise radiated by a really good silencer is much like that made by swiping a metal brush along a piece of finished lumber. The expanding gas from the cartridge was trapped in the baffles as the bullet passed through the holes, largely plugging them and forcing the gas to expand in the enclosed spaces inside the can. With five internal baffles - the cover plate made for number six - the noise of the firing was muted to a whisper.

All of which was fine, Kelly thought, but if you missed the target, he would probably hear the even louder sound of the pistol's slide racking back and forth, and the mechanical sounds of a firearm were impossible to mistake for anything harmless. Missing a soda can at fifteen feet did not speak well of his marksmanship. The human head was bigger, of course, but his target area inside the human head was not. Kelly relaxed and tried again, bringing the gun up from his side in a smooth and quick arc. This time he started pulling the trigger just as the silencer can began to occult the target. It worked, after a fashion. The can went down with a,22-inch hole an inch from the bottom. Kelly's timing wasn't quite right. His next shot was roughly in the center of the can, however, evoking a smile. He ejected the magazine, loading five hollow-point rounds, and a minute later, the can was no longer usable as a target, with seven holes, six of them roughly grouped in the center.

'Still have the old touch, Johnnie-boy,' Kelly said to himself, safing the pistol. But this was in daylight against a stationary piece of red metal, and Kelly knew that. He walked back to his shop and stripped the pistol down again. The suppressor had tolerated the use without any apparent damage, but he cleaned it anyway, lightly oiling the internal parts. One more thing, he thought. With a small brush and white enamel he painted a straight white line down the top of the slide. Now it was two in the afternoon. Kelly allowed himself a light lunch before starting his afternoon exercises.

'Wow, that much?'

'You complaining?' Tucker demanded. 'What's the matter, can't you handle it?'

'Henry, I can handle whatever you deliver,' Piaggi replied, more than a little miffed at first by the man's arrogance, then wondering what might come next.

'We're going to be here three days!' Eddie Morello whined for his part.

'Don't trust your old lady that long?' Tucker grinned at the man. Eddie would have to be next, he had already decided. Morello didn't have much sense of humor anyway. His face flushed red.

'Look, Henry-'

'Settle down, everybody.' Piaggi looked at the eight kilos of material on the table before turning back to Tucker. 'I'd love to know where you get this stuff.'

'I'm sure you would, Tony, but we already talked about that. Can you handle it?'

'You gotta remember, once you start this sort of thing, it's kinda hard to stop it. People depend on you, kinda like what do you tell the bear when you're outa cookies, y'know?' Piaggi was already thinking. He had contacts in Philadelphia and New York, young men - like himself, tired of working for a mustache with old-fashioned rules. The money potential here was stunning. Henry had access to - what? he wondered. They had started only two months before, with two kilograms that had assayed out to a degree of purity that only the best Sicilian White matched, but at half the delivery price. And the problems associated with delivery were Henry's, not his, which made the deal doubly attractive. Finally, the physical security arrangements were what most impressed Piaggi. Henry was no dummy, not some upstart with big ideas and small brains. He was, in fact, a businessman, calm and professional, someone who might make a serious ally and associate, Piaggi thought now.

'My supply is pretty solid. Let me worry about that, paisan.'

'Okay.' Piaggi nodded. 'There is one problem, Henry. It'll take me a while to get the cash together for something this big. You should have warned me, man.'

Tucker allowed himself a laugh. 'I didn't want to scare you off, Anthony.'

'Trust me on the money?'

A nod and a look. 'I know you're a serious guy.' Which was the smart play. Piaggi wouldn't walk away from the chance to establish a regular supply to his associates. The long-term money was just too good. Angelo Vorano might not have grasped that, but he had served as the means to meet Piaggi, and that was enough. Besides, Angelo was now crab shit.

'This is pure stuff, same as before?' Morello asked, annoying both of the others..

'Eddie, the man isn't going to trust us on the cash and fuck us at the same time, is he?' Piaggi asked.

'Gentlemen, let me tell you what's happening here, okay? I got a big supply of good stuff. Where I get it, how I get it, that's my business. I even got a territory I don't want you fooling with, but we ain't bumped heads yet on the street and we'll keep it that way.' Both of the Italians nodded, Tucker saw. Eddie dumbly, but Tony with understanding and respect. Piaggi spoke the same way:

'You need distribution. We can handle that. You have your own territory, and we can respect that, too.'

It was time for the next play. 'I didn't get this far by being stupid. After today, you guys are out of this part of the business.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, no more boat rides. I mean you guys don't handle the material anymore.'

Piaggi smiled. He'd done this four times now, and the novelty had already worn off. 'You have no argument from me on that. If you want, I can have my people take deliveries whenever you want.'

'We separate the stuff from the money. We handle it like a business,' Tucker said. 'Line of credit, like.'

'The stuff comes over first.'

'Fair enough, Tony. You pick good people, okay? The idea is we separate you and me from the drugs as much as possible.'

'People get caught, they talk,' Morello pointed out. He felt excluded from the conversation, but wasn't quite bright enough to grasp the significance of that.

'Mine don't,' Tucker said evenly. 'My people know better.'

'That was you, wasn't it?' Piaggi asked, making the connection and getting a nod. 'I like your style, Henry. Try to be more careful next time, okay?'.

'I spent two year's getting this all set up, cost me a lot of money. I want this operation to run for a long time, and I'm not taking any more chances than I have to anymore. Now, when can you pay me off for this load?'

'I brought an even hundred with me.' Tony waved towards the duffel bag on the deck. This little operation had grown with surprising rapidity as it was, but the first three loads had sold off for fine prices, and Tucker, Piaggi thought, was a man you could trust, insofar as you could trust anyone in this line of work. But, he figured, a rip would have happened already if that was what Tucker wanted, and this much drugs was too much for a guy running that kind of setup. 'It's yours to take, Henry. Looks like we're going to owe you another... five hundred? I'll need some time, like a week or so. Sorry, man, but you kinda sandbagged me this way. Takes time to front up that much cash, y'know?'

'Call it four, Tony. No sense squeezing your friends first time out. Let's generate a little goodwill at first, okay?'

'Special introductory offer?' Piaggi laughed at that and tossed Henry a beer. 'You gotta have some Italian blood in you, boy. Okay! We'll do it like you say, man.' Just how good is that sapply of yours, Heary? Piaggi couldn't ask.

'And now there's work to do.' Tucker slit open the first plastic bag and dumped it into a stainless-steel mixing bowl, glad that he wouldn't have to trouble himself with this mess again. The seventh step in his marketing plan was now complete. From now on he'd have others do this kitchen stuff, under his supervision at first, of course, but starting today Henry Tucker would start acting like the executive he had become. Mixing the inert material into the bowl, he congratulated himself on his intelligence. He'd started the business in exactly the right way, taking risks, but carefully considered ones, building his organization from the bottom up, doing things himself, getting his hands dirty. Perhaps Piaggi's antecedents had started the same way, Tucker thought. Probably Tony had forgotten that, and forgotten also its implications. But that wasn't Tucker's problem.

'Look, Colonel, I was just an aide, okay? How many times do I have to tell you that? I did the same thing your generals' aides do, all the littler dumb stuff.'

'Then why take such a job?' It was sad, Colonel Nikolay Yevgeniyevich Grishanov thought, that a man had to go through this, but Colonel Zacharias wasn't a man. He was an enemy, the Russian reminded himself with some reluctance, and he wanted to get the man talking again.

'Isn't it the same in your air force? You get noticed by a general and you get promoted a lot faster.' The American paused for a moment. 'I wrote speeches, too.' That couldn't get him into any trouble, could it?

'That's the job of a political officer in my air force,' Grishanov dismissed that frivolity with a wave.

It was their sixth session. Grishanov was the only Soviet officer allowed to interview these Americans, the Vietnamese were playing their cards so carefully. Twenty of them, all the same, all different. Zacharias was as much an intelligence officer as fighter pilot, his dossier said. He'd spent his twenty-odd-year career studying air-defense systems. A master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in electrical engineering. The dossier even included a recently acquired copy of his master's thesis, 'Aspects of Microwave Propagation and Diffusion over Angular Terrain', photocopied from the university archives by some helpful soul, one of the unknown three who had contributed to his knowledge of the Colonel. The thesis ought to have been classified immediately upon its completion - as would have happened in the Soviet Union, Grishanov knew. It was a very clever examination of what happened to low-frequency search-radar energy - and how, incidentally, an aircraft could use mountains and hills to mask itself from it. Three years after that, following a tour of duty in a fighter squadron, he'd been assigned to a tour of duty at Offutt Air Force Base, just outside Omaha, Nebraska. Part of the Strategic Air Command's war-plans staff, he'd worked on flight profiles which might allow American B-52 bombers to penetrate Soviet air defenses, applying his theoretical knowledge of physics to the practical world of strategic-nuclear war.

Grishanov could not bring himself to hate this man. A fighter pilot himself, having just completed a regimental command in PVO-Strany, the Soviet air-defense command, and already selected for another, the Russian colonel was in a curious way Zacharias's exact counterpart. His job, in the event of war, was to stop those bombers from ravaging his country, and in peace to plan methods of making their penetration of Soviet air space as difficult as possible. That identity made his current job both difficult and necessary. Not a KGB officer, certainly not one of these little brown savages, he took no pleasure at all in hurting people - shooting them down was something else entirely - even Americans who plotted the destruction of his country. But those who knew how to extract information did not know how to analyze what he was looking for, nor even what questions to ask - and writing the questions down would be no help; you had to see the man's eyes when he spoke. A man clever enough to formulate such plans was also clever enough to lie with enough conviction and authority to fool almost anyone.

Grishanov didn't like what he saw now. This was a skillful man, and a courageous one, who had fought to establish missile-hunting specialists the Americans called Wild Weasels. It was a term a Russian might have used for the mission, named for vicious little predators who chased their prey into their very dens. This prisoner had flown eighty-nine such missions, if the Vietnamese had recovered the right pieces from the right aircraft - like Russians, Americans kept a record of their accomplishments on their aircraft - this was exactly the man he needed to talk to. Perhaps that was a lesson he would write about, Grishanov thought. Such pride told your enemies whom they had captured, and much of what he knew. But that was the way of fighter pilots, and Grishanov would himself have balked at the concealment of his deeds against his country's enemies. The Russian also tried to tell himself that he was sparing harm to the man across the table. Probably Zacharias had lulled many Vietnamese - and not simple peasants, but skilled, Russian-trained missile technicians - and this country's government would want to punish him for that. But that was not his concern, and he didn't want to allow political feelings to get in the way of his professional obligations. His was one of the most scientific and certainly the most complex aspects of national defense. It was his duty to plan for an attack of hundreds of aircraft, each of which had a crew of highly trained specialists. The way they thought, their tactical doctrine, was as important as their plans. And as far as he was concerned, the Americans could kill all of the bastards they wanted. The nasty little fascists had as much to do with his country's political philosophy as cannibals did with gourmet cooking.

'Colonel, I do know better than that,' Grishanov said patiently. He laid the most recently arrived document on the table. 'I read this last night. It's excellent work.'

The Russian's eyes never left Colonel Zacharias. The American's physical reaction was remarkable. Though something of an intelligence officer himself, he had never dreamed that someone in Vietnam could get word to Moscow, then to have Americans under their control find something like this. His face proclaimed what he was thinking: Howcould they know so much about me? How could they have reached that far back into his past? Who possibly could have done it? Was anyone that good, that professional? The Vietnamese were such fools! Like many Russian officers, Grishanov was a serious and thorough student of military history. He'd read all manner of arcane documents while sitting in regimental ready rooms. From one he'd never forget, he learned how the Luftwaffe had interrogated captured airmen, and that lesson was one he would try to apply here. While physical abuse had only hardened this man's resolve, he had just been shaken to his soul by a mere sheaf of paper. Every man had strengths and every man had weaknesses. It took a person of intelligence to recognize the differences.

'How is it that this was never classified?' Grishanov asked, lighting a cigarette.

'It's just theoretical physics,' Zacharias said, shrugging his thin shoulders, recovering enough that he tried to conceal his despair. 'The telephone company was more interested than anybody else.'

Grishanov tapped the thesis with his finger. 'Well, I tell you, I learned several things from that last night. Predicting false echoes from topographical maps, modeling the blind spots mathematically! You can plan an approach route that way, plot maneuvers from one such point to another. Brilliant! Tell me, what sort of place is Berkeley?'

'Just a school, California style,' Zacharias replied before catching himself. He was talking. He wasn't supposed to talk. He was trained not to talk. He was trained on what to expect, and what he could safely do, how to evade and disguise. But that training never quite anticipated this. And, dear God, was he tired, and scared, and sick of living up to a code of conduct that didn't count for beans to anyone else.

'I know little of your country - except professional matters, of course. Are there great regional differences? You come from Utah. What sort of place is it?'

'Zacharias, Robin G. Colonel -'

Grishanov raised his hands. 'Please, Colonel I know all that. I also know your place of birth in addition to the date. There is no base of your air force near Salt Lake City. All I know is from maps. I will probably never visit this part - any part of your country. In this Berkeley part of California, it is green, yes? I was told once they grow wine grapes there. But I know nothing of Utah. There is a large lake there, but it's called Salt Lake, yes? It's salty?'

'Yes, that's why -'

'How can it be salty? The ocean is a thousand kilometers away, with mountains in between, yes?' He didn't give the American time to reply. 'I know the Caspian Sea quite well. I was stationed at a base there once. It isn't salty. But this place is? How strange.' He stubbed out his cigarette.

The man's head jerked up a little. 'Not sure, I'm not a geologist. Something left over from another time, I suppose.'

'Perhaps so. There are mountains there, too, yes?'

'Wasatch Mountains,' Zacharias confirmed somewhat drunkenly.

One clever thing about the Vietnamese, Grishanov thought, the way they fed their prisoners, food a hog would eat only from necessity. He wondered if it were a deliberate and thought-out diet or something fortuitously resulting from mere barbarity. Political prisoners in the Gulag ate better, but the diet of these Americans lowered their resistance to disease, debilitated them to the point that the act of escape would be doomed by inadequate stamina. Rather like what the fascisti did to Soviet prisoners, distasteful or not, it was useful to Grishanov. Resistance, physical and mental, required energy, and you could watch these men lose their strength during the hours of interrogation, watch their courage wane as their physical needs drew more and more upon their supply of psychological resolve. He was learning how to do this. It was time-consuming, but it was a diverting process, learning to pick apart the brains of men not unlike himself.

'The skiing, is it good?'

Zacharias's eyes blinked, as though the question took him away to a different time and place. 'Yeah, it is.'

'That is something one will never do here, Colonel. I like cross-country skiing for exercise, and to get away from things. I had wooden skis, but in my last regiment my maintenance officer made me steel skis from aircraft parts.'

'Steel?'

'Stainless steel, heavier than aluminum but more flexible. I prefer it. From, a wing panel on our new interceptor, project E-266.'

'What's that?' Zacharias knew nothing of the new MiG-25.

'Your people now call it Foxbat. Very fast, designed to catch one of your B-70 bombers.'

'But we stopped that project,' Zacharias objected.

'Yes, I know that. But your project got me a wonderfully fast fighter to fly. When I return home, I will command the first regiment of them.'

'Fighter planes made of steel? Why?'

'It resists aerodynamic heating much better than aluminum,' Grishanov explained. 'And you can make good skis from discarded parts.' Zacharias was very confused now. 'So how well do you think we would do with my steel fighters and your aluminum bombers?'

'I guess that depends on -' Zacharias started to say, then stopped himself cold. His eyes looked across the table, first with confusion at what he'd almost said, then with resolve.

Too soon, Grishanov told himself with disappointment. He'd pushed a little too soon. This one had courage. Enough to take his Wild Weasel 'downtown,' the phrase the Americans used, over eighty times. Enough to resist for a long time. But Grishanov had plenty of time.