Without Remorse

CHAPTER 3

Captivity

After replacing all the diving gear in the machine shop, Kelly took a two-wheel hand truck out onto the quay to handle the groceries. Rosen insisted on helping. His new screws would arrive by boat the next day, and the surgeon didn't seem in any hurry to take his boat back out.

'So,' Kelly said, 'you teach surgery?'

'Eight years now, yeah.' Roeen evened up the boxes on the two-wheeler.

'You don't took like a surgeon.'

Rosen took the compliment with grace. 'We're not all violinists. My father was a bricklayer.'

'Mine was a fireman.' Ketty started wheeling the groceries towards the bunker.

'Speaking of surgeons...' Rosen pointed at Kelly's chest. 'Some good ones worked on you. That one looks like it was nasty.'

Kelly nearly stopped. 'Yeah, I got real careless that time. Not as bad as it looks, though, just grazed the lung.'

Rosen grunted. 'So I see. Must have missed your heart by nearly two inches. No big deal.'

Kelly moved the boxes into the pantry. 'Nice to talk to somebody who understands, doc,' he noted, wincing inwardly at the thought, remembering the feel of the bullet when it had spun him around. 'Like I said - careless.'

'How long were you over there?'

'Total? Maybe eighteen months. Depends on if you count the hospital time.'

'That's a Navy Cross you have hanging on the wall. Is that what it's for?'

Kelly shook his head. 'That was something else. I had to go up north to retrieve somebody, A-6 pilot. I didn't get hurt, but I got sicker 'n' hell. I had some scratches - you know - from thorns and stuff. They got infected as hell from the river water, would you believe? Three weeks in the hospital from that. It was worse'n being shot.'

'Not a very nice place, is it?' Rosen asked as they came back for the last load.

'They say there's a hundred different kinds of snake there. Ninety-nine are poisonous.'

'And the other one?'

Kelly handed a carton over to the doctor. 'That one eats your ass whole.' He laughed. 'No, I didn't like it there much. But that was the job, and I got that pilot out, and the Admiral made me a chief and got me a medal. Come on, I'll show you my baby.' Kelly waved Rosen aboard. The tour took five minutes, with the doctor taking note of all the differences. The amenities were there, but not glitzed up. This guy, he saw, was all business, and his charts were all brand new. Kelly fished out another beer from his cooler for the doctor and another for himself.

'What was Okinawa like?' Kelly asked with a smile, each man sizing up the other, each liking what he saw.

Rosen shrugged and grunted eloquently. 'Tense. We had a lot of work, and the kamikazes seemed to think the red cross on the ship made a hell of a nice target.'

'You were working while they were coming in at you?'

'Injured people can't wait, Kelly.'

Kelly finished his beer. 'I'd rather be shooting back. Let me get Pam's stuff and we can get back in the air conditioning.' He headed aft and picked up her backpack. Rosen was already on the quay, and Kelly tossed the backpack across. Rosen looked too late, missed the catch, and the pack landed on the concrete. Some contents spilled out, and from twenty feet away, Kelly immediately saw what was wrong even before the doctor's head turned to look at him.

There was a large brown plastic prescription bottle, but without a label. The top had been loose, and from it had spilled a couple of capsules.

Some things are instantly clear. Kelly stepped slowly off the boat to the quay. Rosen picked up the container and placed the spilled capsules back in it before snapping down the white plastic top. Then he handed it to Kelly.

'I know they're not yours, John.'

'What are they, Sam?'

His voice could not have been more dispassionate. 'The trade name is Quaalude. Methaqualone. It's a barbiturate, a sedative. A sleeping pill. We use it to get people off into dreamland. Pretty powerful. A little too powerful, in fact. A lot of people think it ought to be taken off the market. No label. It's not a prescription.'

Kelly suddenly felt tired and old. And betrayed somehow. 'Yeah.'

'You didn't know?'

'Sam, we only met - not even twenty-four hours ago. I don't know anything about her.'

Rosen stretched and looked around the horizon for a moment. 'Okay, now I'm going to start being a doctor, okay? Have you ever done drugs?'

'No! I hate the goddamned stuff. People die because of it!' Kelly's anger was immediate and vicious, but it wasn't aimed at Sam Rosen.

The professor took the outburst calmly. It was his turn to be businesslike. 'Settle down. People get hooked on these things. How doesn't matter. Getting excited doesn't help. Take a deep breath, let it out slow.'

Kelly did, and managed a smile at the incongruity of the moment. 'You sound just like my dad.'

'Firemen are smart.' He paused. 'Okay, your lady friend may have a problem. But she seems like a nice girl, and you seem like a mensch. So do we try and solve the problem or not?'

'I guess that's up to her,' Kelly observed, bitterness creeping into his voice. He felt betrayed. He'd started giving his heart away again, and now he had to face the fact that he might have been giving it to drugs, or what drugs had made of what ought to have been a person. It might all have been a waste of time.

Rosen became a little stern. 'That's right, it is up to her, but it might be up to you, too, a little, and if you act like an idiot, you won't help her very much.'

Kelly was amazed by how rational the man sounded under the circumstances. 'You must be a pretty good doc.'

'I'm one hell of a good doc,' Rosen announced. 'This isn't my field, but Sarah is damned good. It may be you're both lucky. She's not a bad girl, John. Something's bothering her. She's nervous about something, in case you didn't notice.'

'Well, yes, but -' And some part of Kelly's brain said, See!

'But you mainly noticed she's pretty. I was in my twenties once myself, John. Come on, we may have a little work ahead.' He stopped and peered at Kelly. 'I'm missing something here. What is it?'

'I lost a wife less than a year ago.' Kelly explained on for a minute or two.

'And you thought that maybe she -'

'Yeah, I guess so. Stupid, isn't it?' Kelly wondered why he was opening up this way. Why not just let Pam do whatever she wanted? But that wasn't an answer. If he did that, he would just be using her for his selfish needs, discarding her when the bloom came off the rose. For all the reverses his life had taken in the past year, he knew that he couldn't do that, couldn't be one of those men. He caught Rosen looking fixedly at him.

Rosen shook his head judiciously. 'We all have vulnerabilities. You have training and experience to deal with your problems. She doesn't. Come on, we have work to do.' Rosen took the hand truck in his large, soft hands and wheeled it towards the bunker.

The cool air inside was a surprisingly harsh blast of reality. Pam was trying to entertain Sarah, but not succeeding. Perhaps Sarah had written it off to the awkward social situation, but physicians' minds are always at work, and she was starting to apply a professional eye to the person in front of her. When Sam entered the living room, Sarah turned and gave him a look that Kelly was able to understand.

'And so, well, I left home when I was sixteen,' Pam was saying, rattling on in a monotonal voice that exposed more than she knew. Her eyes turned, too, and focused on the backpack Kelly held in his hand. Her voice had a surprisingly brittle character that he'd not noticed before.

'Oh, great. I need some of that stuff.' She came over and took the pack from his hands, then headed towards the master bedroom. Kelly and Rosen watched her leave, then Sam handed his wife the plastic container. She needed only one look.

'I didn't know,' Kelly said, feeling the need to defend himself. 'I didn't see her take anything.' He thought back, trying to remember times when she had not been in his sight, and concluded that she might have taken pills two or perhaps three times, then realizing what her dreamy eyes had really been after all.

'Sarah?' Sam asked.

'Three- hundred-milligram. It ought not to be a severe case, but she does need assistance.'

Pam came back into the room a few seconds later, telling Kelly that she'd left something on the boat. Her hands weren't trembling, but only because she was holding them together to keep them still. It was so clear, once you knew what to look for. She was trying to control herself, and almost succeeding, but Pam wasn't an actress.

'Is this it?' Kelly asked. He held the bottle in his hands. His reward for the harsh question was like a well-earned knife in the heart.

Pam didn't reply for a few seconds. Her eyes fixed on the brown plastic container, and the first thing Kelly saw was a sudden, hungry expression as though her thoughts were already reaching for the bottle, already picking one or more of the tablets out, already anticipating whatever it was that she got from the damned things, not caring, not even noting that there were others in the room. Then the shame hit her, the realization that whatever image she had tried to convey to the others was rapidly diminishing. But worst of all, after her eyes swept over Sam and Sarah, they settled on Kelly again, oscillating between his hand and his face. At first hunger vied with shame, but shame won, and when her eyes locked on his, the expression on her face began as that of a child caught misbehaving, but it and she matured into something else, as she saw that something which might have grown into love was changing over an interval of heartbeats into contempt and disgust. Her breathing changed in a moment, becoming rapid, then irregular as the sobs began, and she realized that the greatest disgust was within her own mind, for even a drug addict must look inward, and doing so through the eyes of others merely added a cruel edge.

'I'm s- s-sorry, Kel-el-y. I di-didn't tel-el...' she tried to say, her body collapsing into itself. Pam seemed to shrink before their eyes as she saw what might have been a chance evaporate, and beyond that dissipating cloud was only despair. Pam turned away, sobbing, unable to face the man she'd begun to love.

It was decision time for John Terrence Kelly. He could feel betrayed, or he could show the same compassion to her that she had shown to him less than twenty hours before. More than anything else, what decided it was her look to him, the shame so manifest on her face. He could not just stand there. He had to do something, else his own very proud image of himself would dissolve as surely and rapidly as hers.

Kelly's eyes filled with tears as well. He went to her and wrapped his arms around her to keep her from falling, cradling her like a child, pulling her head back against his chest, because it was now his time to be strong for her, to set whatever thoughts he had aside for a while, and even the dissonant part of his mind refused to cackle its Itold you so at this moment, because there was someone hurt in his arms, and this wasn't the time for that. They stood together for a few minutes while the others watched with a mixture of personal unease and professional detachment.

'I've been trying,' she said presently, 'I really have - but I was so scared.'

'It's okay,' Kelly told her, not quite catching what she had just said. 'You were there for me, and now it's my turn to be here for you.'

'But - ' She started sobbing again, and it took a minute or so before she got it out. 'I'm not what you think I am.'

Kelly let a smile creep into his voice as he missed the second warning. 'You don't know what I think, Pammy. It's okay. Really.' He'd concentrated so hard on the girl in his arms that he hadn't noticed Sarah Rosen at his side.

'Pam, how about we take a little walk?' Pam nodded agreement, and Sarah led her outside, leaving Kelly to look at Sam.

'You are a mensch,' Rosen announced with satisfaction at his earlier diagnosis of the man's character. 'Kelly, how close is the nearest town with a pharmacy?'

'Solomons, I guess. Shouldn't she be in a hospital?'

'I'll let Sara make the call on that, but I suspect it's not necessary.'

Kelly looked at the bottle still in his hand. 'Well, I'm going to deep-six these damned things.'

'No! ' Rosen snapped. 'I'll take them. They all carry lot numbers. The police can identify the shipment that was diverted. I'll lock them up on my boat.'

'So what do we do now?'

'We wait a little while.'

Sarah and Pam came back in twenty minutes later, holding hands like mother and daughter. Pam's head was up now, though her eyes were still watery.

'We got a winner here, folks,' Sarah told them. 'She's been trying for a month all by herself.'

'She says it isn't hard,' Pam said.

'We can make it a lot easier,' Sarah assured her. She handed a list to her husband. 'Find a drugstore. John, get your boat moving. Now.'

'What happens?' Kelly asked thirty minutes and five miles later. Solomons was already a tan-green line on the northwestern horizon.

'The treatment regime is pretty simple, really. We support her with barbiturates and ease her off.'

'You give her drugs to get her off drugs?'

'Yep.' Rosen nodded. 'That's how it's done. It takes time for the body to flush out all the residual material in her tissues. The body becomes dependent on the stuff, and if you try to wean them off too rapidly, you can get some adverse effects, convulsions, that sort of thing. Occasionally people die from it.'

'What?' said Kelly, alarmed. 'I don't know anything about this, Sam.'

'Why should you? That's our job, Kelly. Sarah doesn't think that's a problem in this case. Relax, John. You give' - Rosen took the list from his pocket - 'yeah, I thought so, phenobarb, you give that to attenuate the withdrawal symptoms. Look, you know how to drive a boat, right?'

'Yep,' Kelly said, turning, knowing what came next.

'Let us do our job. Okay?'

The man didn't feel much like sleep, the coastguardsmen saw, much to their own displeasure. Before they'd had the chance to recover from the previous day's adventures, he was up again, drinking coffee in the operations room, looking over the charts yet again, using his hand to make circles, which he compared with the memorized course track of the forty-one-boat.

'How fast is a sailboat?' he asked an annoyed and irritable Quartermaster First Class Manuel Oreza.

'That one? Not very, with a fair breeze and calm seas, maybe five knots, a little more if the skipper is smart and experienced. Rule of thumb is, one point three times the square root waterline length is your hull speed, so for that one, five or six knots.' And he hoped the civilian was duly impressed with that bit of nautical trivia.

'It was windy last night,' the official noted crossly.

'A small boat doesn't go faster on choppy seas, it goes slower. That's because it spends a lot of time going up and down instead of forward.'

'So how did he get away from you?'

'He didn't get away from me, okay?' Oreza wasn't clear on who this guy was or how senior a position he actually held, but he wouldn't have taken this sort of abuse from a real officer - but a real officer would not have harassed him this way; a real officer would have listened and understood. The petty officer took a deep breath, wishing for once that there was an officer here to explain things. Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians. 'Look, sir, you told me to lay back, didn't you? I told you that we'd lose him in the clutter from the storm, and we did. Those old radars we use aren't worth a damn in bad weather, least not for a dinky little target like a day-sailer.'

'You already said that.'

And I'll keep saying it until you figure it out, Oreza managed not to say, catching a warning look from Mr English. Portagee took a deep breath and looked down at the chart.

'So where do you think he is?'

'Hell, the Bay ain't that wide, so's you have two coastlines to worry about. Most houses have their own little docks, you have all these creeks. If it was me, I'd head up a creek. Better place to hide than a dock, right?'

'You're telling me he's gone,' the civilian observed darkly.

'Sure as hell,' Oreza agreed.

'Three months of work went into that!'

? can't help that, sir.' The coastguardsman paused. 'Look, he probably went east rather than west, okay? Better to run before the wind than tack into it. That's the good news. Problem is, a little boat like that, you can haul it out, put it on a trailer. Hell, it could be in Massachusetts by now.'

He looked up from the chart. 'Oh, that's just what I wanted to hear!'

'Sir, you want me to lie to you?'

'Three months!'

He just couldn't let go, Oreza and English thought at the same time. You had to learn how to do that. Sometimes the sea took something, and you did your best looking and searching, and mostly you found it, but not always, and when you failed, the time came when you had to let the sea claim the prize. Neither man had ever grown to like it, but that was the way things were.

'Maybe you can whistle up some helicopter support. The Navy has a bunch of stuff at Pax River,' Warrant Officer English pointed out. It would also get the guy out of his station, an objective worthy of considerable effort for all the disruption he was causing to English and his men.

'Trying to get rid of me?' the man asked with an odd smile.

'Excuse me, sir?' English responded innocently. A pity, the warrant officer thought, that the man wasn't a total fool.

Kelly tied back up at his quay after seven. He let Sam take the medications ashore while he snapped various covers over his instrument panels and settled his boat down for the night. It had been a quiet return trip from Solomons. Sam Rosen was a good man at explaining things, and Kelly a good questioner. What he'd needed to learn he'd picked up on the way out, and for most of the return trip he'd been alone with his thoughts, wondering what he would do, how he should act. Those were questions without easy answers, and attending to ship's business didn't help, much as he'd hoped that it would. He took even more time than was necessary checking the mooring lines, doing the same for the surgeon's boat as well before heading inside.

The Lockheed DC-130E Hercules cruised well above the low cloud deck, riding smoothly and solidly as it had done for 2,354 hours of logged flight time since leaving the Lockheed plant at Marietta, Georgia, several years earlier. Everything had the appearance of a pleasant flying day. In the roomy front office, the flight crew of four watched the clear air and various instruments, as their duties required. The four turboprop engines hummed along with their accustomed reliability, giving the aircraft a steady high-pitched vibration that transmitted itself through the comfortable highbacked seats and created standing circular ripples in their Styrofoam coffee cups. All in all, the atmosphere was one of total normality. But anyone seeing the exterior of the aircraft could tell different. This aircraft belonged to the 99th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron.

Beyond the outer engines on each wing of the Hercules hung additional aircraft. Each of these was a Model-147SC drone. Originally designed to be high-speed targets with the designation Firebee-II, now they bore the informal name 'Buffalo Hunter.' In the rear cargo area of the DC-130E was a second crew which was now powering up both of the miniature aircraft, having already programmed them for a mission sufficiently secret that none of them actually knew what it was all about. They didn't have to. It was merely a matter of telling the drones what to do and when to do it. The chief technician, a thirty-year-old sergeant, was working a bird code-named Cody-193. His crew station allowed him to turn and look out a small porthole to inspect his bird visually, which he did even though there was no real reason to do so. The sergeant loved the things as a child will love a particularly entertaining toy. He'd worked with the drone program for ten years, and this particular one he had flown sixty-one times. That was a record for the area.

Cody- 193 had a distinguished ancestry. Its manufacturers, Teledyne-Ryan of San Diego, California, had built Charles Lindbergh's Spiritof St Louis, but the company had never quite managed to cash in on that bit of aviation history. Struggling from one small contract to another, it had finally achieved financial stability by making targets. Fighter aircraft had to practice shooting at something. The Firebee drone had begun life as just that, a miniature jet aircraft whose mission was to die gloriously at the hands of a fighter pilot -except that the sergeant had never quite seen things that way. He was a drone controller, and his job, he thought, was to teach those strutting eagles a lesson by flying 'his' bird in such a way as to make their missiles hit nothing more substantial than air. In fact, fighter pilots had learned to curse his name, though Air Force etiquette also required them to buy him a bottle of booze for every miss. Then a few years earlier someone had noted that if a Firebee drone was hard for our people to hit, the same might be true of others who fired at aircraft for more serious purposes than the annual William Tell competition. It was also a hell of a lot easier on the crews of low-level reconnaissance aircraft.

Cody- 193's engine was turning at full power, hanging from its pylon and actually giving the mother aircraft a few knots of free airspeed. The sergeant gave it a final look before turning back to his instruments. Sixty-one small parachute symbols were painted on the left side just forward of the wing, and with luck, in a few days he would paint a sixty-second. Though he was not clear on the precise nature of this mission, merely beating the competition was reason enough to take the utmost care in preparing his personal toy for the current game.

'Be careful, baby,' the sergeant breathed as it dropped free. Cody-193 was on its own.

Sarah had a light dinner cooking. Kelly smelled it even before opening the door. Kelly came inside to see Rosen sitting in the living room.

'Where's Pam?'

'We gave her some medication,' Sam answered. 'She ought to be sleeping now.'

'She is,' Sarah confirmed, passing through the room on the way to the kitchen. 'I just checked. Poor thing, she's exhausted, she's been doing without sleep for some time. It's catching up with her.'

'But if she's been taking sleeping pills -'

'John, your body reacts strangely to the things,' Sam explained. 'It fights them off, or tries to, at the same time it becomes dependent on them. Sleep will be her big problem for a while.'

'There's something else,' Sarah reported. 'She's very frightened of something, but she wouldn't say what it was.' She paused, then decided that Kelly ought to know. 'She's been abused, John. I didn't ask about it - one thing at a time - but somebody's given her a rough time.'

'Oh?' Kelly looked up from the sofa. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean she's been sexually assaulted,' Sarah said in a calm, professional voice that belied her personal feelings.

'You mean raped?' Kelly asked in a low voice while the muscles of his arms tensed.

Sarah nodded, unable now to hide her distaste. 'Almost certainly. Probably more than once. There is also evidence of physical abuse on her back and buttocks.'

'I didn't notice.'

'You're not a doctor,' Sarah pointed out. 'How did you meet?'

Kelly told her, remembering the look in Pam's eyes and knowing now what it must have been from. Why hadn't he noticed it? Why hadn't he noticed a lot of things? Kelly raged.

'So she was trying to escape... I wonder if the same man got her on the barbiturates?' Sarah asked. 'Nice guy, whoever it was.'

'You mean that somebody's been working her over, and got her on drugs?' Kelly said. 'But why?'

'Kelly, please don't take this wrong... but she might have been a prostitute. Pimps control girls that way.' Sarah Rosen hated herself for saying that, but this was business and Kelly had to know. 'She's young, pretty, a runaway from a dysfunctional family. The physical abuse, the undernourishment, it all fits the pattern.'

Kelly was looking down at the floor. 'But she's not like that. I don't understand.' But in some ways he did, he told himself, thinking back. The ways in which she'd clung to him and drawn him to her. How much was simply skill, and how much real human feelings? It was a question he had no desire to face. What was the right thing to do? Follow your mind? Follow your heart? And where might they lead?

'She's fighting back, John. She's got guts.' Sarah sat across from Kelly. 'She's been on the road for over four years, doing God knows what, but something in her won't quit. But she can't do it alone. She needs you. Now I have a question.' Sarah looked hard at him. 'Will you be there to help her?'

Kelly looked up, his blue eyes the color of ice as he searched for what he really felt. 'You guys are really worked up about this, aren't you?'

Sarah sipped from a drink she'd made for herself. She was rather a dumpy woman, short and overweight. Her black hair hadn't seen a stylist in months. All in all she looked like the sort of woman who, behind the wheel of a car, attracts the hatred of male drivers. But she spoke with focused passion, and her intelligence was already very clear to her host. 'Do you have any idea how bad it's getting? Ten years ago, drug abuse was so rare that I hardly had to bother with it. Oh, sure, I knew about it, read the articles from Lexington, and every so often we'd get a heroin case. Not very many. Just a black problem, people thought. Nobody really gave much of a damn. We're paying for that mistake now. In case you didn't notice, that's all changed - and it happened practically overnight. Except for the project I'm working on, I'm nearly full-time on kids with drug problems. I wasn't trained for this. I'm a scientist, an expert on adverse interactions, chemical structures, how we can design new drugs to do special things - but now I have to spend nearly all of my time in clinical work, trying to keep children alive who should be just learning how to drink a beer but instead have their systems full of chemical shit that never should have made it outside a god-damned laboratory!'

'And it's going to get worse,' Sam noted gloomily.

Sarah nodded. 'Oh yeah, the next big one is cocaine. She needs you, John,' Sarah said again, leaning forward. It was as though she had surrounded herself with her own storm cloud of electrical energy. 'You'd damned well better be there for her, boy. You be there for her! Somebody dealt her a really shitty hand, but she's fighting. There's a person in there.'

'Yes, ma'am,' Kelly said humbly. He looked up and smiled, no longer confused. 'In case you were worried, I decided that a while back.'

'Good.' Sarah nodded curtly.

'What do I do first?'

'More than anything else, she needs rest, she needs good food, and she needs time to flush the barbiturates out of her system. We'll support her with phenobarb, just in case we have withdrawal problems- I don't expect that. I examined her while you two were gone. Her physical problem is not so much addiction as exhaustion and undernourishment. She ought to be ten pounds heavier than she is. She ought to tolerate withdrawal rather well if we support her in other ways.'

'Me, you mean?' Kelly asked.

'That's a lot of it.' She looked over towards the open bedroom door and sighed, the tension going out of her. 'Well, given her underlying condition, that phenobarb will probably have her out for the rest of the night. Tomorrow we start feeding her and exercising her. For now,' Sarah announced, 'we can feed ourselves.'

Dinner talk focused deliberately on other subjects, and Kelly found himself delivering a lengthy discourse on the bottom contours of the Chesapeake Bay, segueing into what he knew about good fishing spots. It was soon decided that his visitors would stay until Monday evening. Time over the dinner table lengthened, and it was nearly ten before they rose. Kelly cleaned up, then quietly entered his bedroom to hear Pam's quiet breathing.

Only thirteen feet long, and a scant three thousand sixty-five pounds of mass - nearly half of that fuel - the Buffalo Hunter angled towards the ground as it accelerated to an initial cruising speed of over five hundred knots. Already its navigational computer, made by Lear-Siegler, was monitoring time and altitude in a very limited way. The drone was programmed to follow a specific flight path and altitude, all painstakingly predetermined for systems that were by later standards absurdly primitive. For all that, Cody-193 was a sporty-looking beast. Its profile was remarkably like that of a blue shark with a protruding nose and underslung air intake for a mouth - stateside it was often painted with aggressive rows of teeth. In this particular case, an experimental paint scheme - flat white beneath and mottled brown and green atop - was supposed to make it harder to spot from the ground - and the air. It was also stealthy - a term not yet invented. Blankets of RAM - radar-absorbing material - were integral with the wing surfaces, and the air intake was screened to attenuate the radar return off the whirling engine blades.

Cody- 193 crossed the border between Laos and North Vietnam at 11:41:38 local time. Still descending, it leveled out for the first time at five hundred feet above ground level, turning northeast, somewhat slower now in the thicker air this close to the ground. The low altitude and small size of the speeding drone made it a difficult target, but by no means an impossible one, and outlying gun positions of the dense and sophisticated North Vietnamese air-defense network spotted it. The drone flew directly towards a recently sited 37mm twin gun mount whose alert crew got their mount slued around quickly enough to loose twenty quick rounds, three of which passed within feet of the diminutive shape but missed. Cody-193 took no note of this, and neither jinked nor evaded the fire. Without a brain, without eyes, it continued along on its flight path rather like a toy train around a Christmas tree while its new owner ate breakfast in the kitchen. In fact it was being watched. A distant EC-121 Warning Star tracked -193 by means of a coded radar transponder located atop the drone's vertical fin.

'Keep going, baby,' a major whispered to himself, watching his scope. He knew of the mission, how important it was, and why nobody else could be allowed to know. Next to him was a small segment from a topographical map. The drone turned north at the right place, dropping down to three hundred feet as it found the right valley, following a small tributary river. At least the guys who programmed it knew their stuff, the major thought.

- 193 had burned a third of its fuel by now and was consuming the remaining amount very rapidly at low level, flying below the crests of the unseen hills to the left and right. The programmers had done their best, but there was one chillingly close call when a puff of wind forced it to the right before the autopilot could correct, and -193 missed an unusually tall tree by a scant seventy feet. Two militiamen were on that crest and fired off their rifles at it, and again the rounds missed. One of them started down the hill towards a telephone, but his companion called for him to stop as -193 flew blindly on. By the time a call was made and received, the enemy aircraft would be long gone, and besides, they'd done their duty in shooting at it. He worried about where their bullets had landed, but it was too late for that.

Colonel Robin Zacharias, USAF, was walking across the dirt of what might in other times and circumstances be called a parade ground, but there were no parades here. A prisoner for over six months, he faced every day as a struggle, contemplating misery more deep and dark than anything he'd been able to imagine. Shot down on his eighty-ninth mission, within sight of rotation home, a completely successful mission brought to a bloody end by nothing more significant than bad luck. Worse, his 'bear' was dead. And he was probably the lucky one, the Colonel thought as he was led across the compound by two small, unfriendly men with rifles. His arms were tied behind him, and his ankles were hobbled because they were afraid of him despite their guns, and even with all that he was also being watched by men in the guard towers.I must really look scary to the little bastards, the fighter pilot told himself.

Zacharias didn't feel very dangerous. His back was still injured from the ejection. He'd hit the ground severely crippled, and his effort to evade capture had been little more than a token gesture, a whole hundred yards of movement over a period of five minutes, right into the arms of the gun crew which had shredded his aircraft.

The abuse had begun there. Paraded through three separate villages, stoned and spat upon, he'd finally ended up here. Wherever here was. There were sea birds. Perhaps he was close to the sea, the Colonel speculated. But the memorial in Salt Lake City, several blocks from his boyhood home, reminded him that gulls were not merely creatures of the sea. In the preceding months he had been subjected to all sorts of physical abuse, but it had strangely slackened off in the past few weeks. Perhaps they'd become tired of hurting him, Zacharias told himself. And maybe there really was a Santa Claus, too, he thought, his head looking down at the dirt. There was little consolation to be had here. There were other prisoners, but his attempts at communicating with them had all failed. His cell had no windows. He'd seen two faces, neither of which he had recognized. On both occasions he'd started to call out a greeting only to be clubbed to the ground by one of his guards. Both men had seen him but made no sound. In both cases he'd seen a smile and a nod, the best that they could do. Both men were of his age, and, he supposed, about his rank, but that was all he knew. What was most frightening to a man who had much to be frightened about was that this was not what he had been briefed to expect. It wasn't the Hanoi Hilton, where all the POWs were supposed to have been congregated. Beyond that he knew virtually nothing, and the unknown can be the most frightening thing of all, especially to a man accustomed over a period of twenty years to being absolute master of his fate. His only consolation, he thought, was that things were as bad as they could be. On that, he was wrong.

'Good morning. Colonel Zacharias,' a voice called across the compound. He looked up to see a man taller than himself, Caucasian, and wearing a uniform very different from that of his guards. He strode towards the prisoner with a smile. 'Very different from Omaha, isn't it?'

That was when he heard a noise, a thin screeching whine, approaching from the southwest. He turned on instinct - an aviator must always look to see an aircraft, no matter where he might be. It appeared in an instant, before the guards had a chance to react.

Buffalo Hunter, Zacharias thought, standing erect, turning, to watch it pass, staring at it, holding his head up, seeing the black rectangle of the camera window, whispering a prayer that the device was operating. When the guards realized what he was doing, a gun butt in the kidneys dropped the colonel to the ground. Suppressing a curse, he tried to deal with the pain as a pair of boots came into his restricted field of vision.

'Do not get overly excited,' the other man said. 'It's heading to Haiphong to count the ships. Now, my friend, we need to become acquainted.'

Cody- 193 continued northeast, holding a nearly constant speed and altitude as it entered the dense air-defense belt surrounding North Vietnam 's only major port. The cameras in the Buffalo Hunter recorded several triple-A batteries, observation points, and more than a few people with AK-47s, all of whom made at least a token shot at the drone. The only thing -193 had going for it was its small size. Otherwise it flew on a straight and level course while its cameras snapped away, recording the images on 2.25-inch film. About the only thing not shot at it were surface-to-air missiles: -193 was too low for that.

'Go, baby, go!' the Major said, two hundred miles away. Outside, the four piston engines of the Warning Star were straining to maintain the altitude necessary for him to watch the drone's progress. His eyes were locked on the flat glass screen, following the binking blip of the radar transponder. Other controllers monitored the location of other American aircraft also visiting the enemy country, in constant communication with red crown, the Navy ship that managed air operations from the seaward side. 'Turn east, baby - now!'

Right on schedule, Cody-193 banked hard to the right, coming a touch lower and screaming over the Haiphong docks at 500 knots, a hundred tracer rounds in its wake. Longshoremen and sailors from various ships looked up in curiosity and irritation, and not a little fear for all the steel flying in the sky over their heads.

'Yes!' the Major shouted, loudly enough that the sergeant-controller to his left looked up in irritation. You were supposed to keep things quiet here. He keyed his mike to speak to red crown. 'Cody-one-niner-three is bingo.'

'Roger, copy bingo on one-niner-three,' the acknowledgment came back. It was a false use of the 'bingo' code word, which ordinarily meant an aircraft with a low fuel state, but it was a term so commonly used that it made a more than adequate disguise. The Navy enlisted man on the other end of the circuit then told an orbiting helicopter crew to wake up.

The drone cleared the coast right on schedule, keeping low for a few more miles before going into its final climb, down to its last hundred pounds of fuel as it reached its pre-programmed point thirty miles offshore and began circling. Now another transponder came on, one tuned to the search radars of US Navy picket ships. One of these, the destroyer HenryB. Wilson, took note of the expected target at the expected time and place. Her missile technicians used the opportunity to run a practice intercept problem, but had to switch off their illumination radars after a few seconds. It made the airedales nervous.

Circling at five thousand feet, Cody-193 finally ran out of fuel and became a glider. When the airspeed fell to the right number, explosive bolts blew a hatch cover off the top, deploying a parachute. The Navy helicopter was already on station, and the white 'chute made for a fine target. The drone's weight was a scant fifteen hundred pounds now, barely that of eight men. Wind and visibility cooperated this day. The 'chute was snagged on their first attempt, and the helicopter turned at once, heading for the carrier USS Constellation, where the drone was carefully lowered into a cradle, ending its sixty-second combat mission. Before the helicopter could find its own spot on the flight deck, a technician was already unfastening the cover plate on the photo compartment and yanking the heavy film cassette from its slot. He took it below at once, and handed it over to another technician in the ship's elaborate photo lab. Processing required a brief six minutes, and the still-damp film was wiped clean and handed over yet again to an intelligence officer. It was better than good. The film was run from one spool to another over a flat glass plate under which was a pair of fluorescent lights.

'Well, Lieutenant?' a captain asked tensely.

'Okay, sir, wait one...' Turning the spool, he pointed to the third image. "There's our first reference point... there's number two, she was right on course... okay, here's the IP... down the valley, over the hill - there, sir! We have two, three frames! Good ones, the sun was just right, clear day - you know why they call these babies Buffalo Hunters? It's -'

'Let me see!' The Captain nearly shoved the junior officer out of the way. There was a man there, an American, with two guards, and a fourth man - but it was the American he wanted to see.

'Here, sir.' The Lieutenant handed over a magnifying glass. 'We might get a good face off of this, and we can play with the negative some more if you give us a little time. Like I said, the cameras can tell the difference between a male and a female -'

'Mmmmm.' The face was black, meaning a white man on the negative. But - 'Damn, I can't tell.'

'Cap'n, that's our job, okay?' He was an intelligence officer. The Captain was not. 'Let us do our job, sir.'

'He's one of ours!'

'Sure as hell, sir, and this guy isn't. Let me take these back to the lab for positive prints and blowups. The air wing will want a look at the port shots, too.'

'They can wait.'

'No, sir, they can't,' the Lieutenant pointed out. But he took a pair of scissors and removed the relevant shots. The remainder of the roll was handed to a chief petty officer, while the Lieutenant and the Captain went back to the photo lab. Fully two months of work had gone into the flight of Cody-193, and the Captain lusted for the information he knew to be on those three two-and-a-quarter-inch frames.

An hour later he had it. An hour after that, he boarded a flight to Danang. Another hour and he was on a flight to Cubi Point Naval Air Station in the Philippines, followed by a puddle-jumper to Clark Air Force Base, and???-135 that would fly directly to California. Despite the time and rigors of the next twenty hours of flying, the Captain slept briefly and fitfully, having solved a mystery whose answer just might change the policy of his government.