Red Rabbit Part 12

Jack set his beer down. "It's amazing how screwed up they are, especially when you compare their internal doc.u.ments with the hard data we learn when our guys get hands-on with their gear. What they call quality control, we call a dog's breakfast. At Langley, I saw some stuff on their fighter planes that the Air Force got, mainly through the Israelis. The G.o.dd.a.m.ned parts don't fit together! They can't even cut aluminum sheets into regular shapes. I mean, a high-school kid in shop cla.s.s would have to do better or flunk out of school. We know they have competent engineers, especially the guys who work in theoretical stuff, but their manufacturing practices are so primitive that you'd expect better from third-graders."

"Not in all areas, Jack," Harding cautioned.

"And not all the Pacific Ocean's blue, Simon. There are islands and volcanoes, sure. I know that. But the rule is the ocean is blue, and the rule in the Soviet Union is s.h.i.+tty work. The problem is that their economic system doesn't reward people for doing good work. There's a saying in economics: 'Bad money drives out good.' That means poor performance will take over if good performance isn't recognized. Well, over there, mainly it isn't, and for their economy it's like cancer. What happens in one place gradually carries over to the whole system."

"There are some things at which they are very good indeed," Harding persisted.

"Simon, the Bolshoi Ballet isn't going to attack into West Germany. Neither is their Olympic team," Jack retorted. "Their military may be competently led at the higher levels, but their equipment is crummy, and the middle-level management is practically nonexistent. Without my gunnery sergeant and my squad leaders, I could not have used my platoon of Marines efficiently, but the Red Army doesn't have sergeants as we understand them. They have competent officers-and, again, some of their theoretical people are world-cla.s.s-and their soldiers are probably patriotic Russians and all that, but without proper training at the tactical level, they're like a beautiful car with flat tires. The engine might turn over and the paint job might s.h.i.+ne, but the car isn't going anywhere."

Harding took a few contemplative puffs. "Then what are we worried about?"

Jack shrugged. "There's a h.e.l.l of a lot of them, and quant.i.ty does have a quality all its own. If we go forward with our defense buildup, however, we can stop anything they try. A Russian tank regiment is just a collection of targets if we have the right equipment and our guys are properly trained and led. Anyway, that's what my report is probably going to say."

"It's a little early for a conclusion," Simon told his new American friend. Ryan hadn't yet learned how a bureaucracy was supposed to work.

"Simon, I used to make my money in trading. You succeed in that business by seeing things a little faster than the next guy, and that means you don't wait until you have every last little crumb of information. I can see where this information is pointing me. It's bad over there, and it's getting worse. Their military is a distillation of what is good and bad in their society. Look at how badly they're doing in Afghanistan. I haven't seen your data, but I've seen what they have at Langley, and it isn't pretty. Their military is performing very poorly in that rockpile."

"I think they will ultimately succeed."

"It's possible," Jack conceded, "but it'll be an ugly win. We did a lot better in Vietnam." He paused. "You guys have ugly memories of Afghanistan, don't you?"

"My great-uncle was there in 1919. He said it was worse than the Battle of the Somme. Kipling did a poem that ends with an instruction to a soldier to blow his brains out rather than be captured there. I'm afraid some Russians have learned that lesson, to their sorrow."

"Yeah, the Afghans are courageous, but not overly civilized," Jack agreed. "But I think they're going to win. There's talk at home about giving them the Stinger SAM. That would neutralize the helicopters the Russians are using, and without those, Ivan's got a problem."

"Is the Stinger that good?"

"Never used it myself, but I've heard some nice things about it."

"And the Russian SAM-seven?"

"They kind of invented the idea of a man-portable SAM, didn't they? But we got a bunch through the Israelis in seventy-three, and our guys weren't all that impressed. Again, Ivan had a great idea, then couldn't execute it properly. That's their curse, Simon."

"Then explain KGB to me," Harding challenged.

"Same as the Bolshoi Ballet and their ice hockey teams. They load a lot of talent and money into that agency, and they get a fair return for it-but they have a lot of spooks skip over the wall, too, don't they?"

"True," Simon had to concede.

"And why, Simon?" Jack asked. "Because they fill their heads with how corrupt and messed up we are, and then when their people get here and look around, it isn't all that bad, is it? h.e.l.l, we have safe houses all over America with KGB guys in them, watching TV. Not many of them decide to go home, either. I've never met a defector, but I've read a lot of transcripts, and they all say pretty much the same thing. Our system is better than theirs, and they're smart enough to tell the difference."

"We have some living here as well," Harding admitted. He didn't want to admit that the Russians also had a few Brits-nowhere near as many, just enough to be a considerable embarra.s.sment to Century House. "You're a hard man to debate, Jack."

"I just speak the truth, buddy. That's what we're here for, isn't it?"

"That's the theory," Harding had to admit. This Ryan fellow would never be a bureaucrat, the Brit decided, and wondered if that was a good thing or bad. The Americans took a different slant on things, and the contrast to his own organization's take was entertaining, at least. Ryan had a lot to learn . . . but he also had a few things to teach, Harding realized. "How's your book coming along?"

Ryan's face changed. "Haven't gotten much work done lately. I do have my computer set up. Hard to concentrate on that after a full day here-but if I don't make the time, the thing will never get done. At heart, I'm lazy," Ryan admitted.

"Then how did you become rich?" Harding demanded. He got a grin.

"I'm also greedy. Gertrude Stein said it, pal: 'I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.' Truer words have never been spoken."

"I must discover that for myself someday," the British civil servant observed.

Oops, Ryan thought. Well, it wasn't his fault, was it? Simon was smart enough to make money in the real world, but he didn't seem to think in those terms. It made good sense to have a smart guy here in the a.n.a.lyst pool at Century House, even though that meant sacrificing his own wellbeing for his country. But that was not a bad thing, and Ryan reflected that he was doing it, too. His advantage was that he'd made his money up front and could afford to kiss this job off and go back to teaching whenever the urge struck him. It was a sort of independence that most government employees would never know. . . . And their work probably suffered because of it, Jack thought.

ZAITZEV MADE HIS WAY out past the various security checkpoints. Some people were frisked at random by the guards to make sure that they weren't taking anything out with them, but the checks-he'd suffered through his share of them-were too cursory to be effective, he thought. Just enough to be a nuisance, and not regular enough to be a real threat-perhaps once in thirty days-and, if you got frisked one day, you knew you were safe for at least the next five or so, because the guards knew all the faces of the people they checked out, and even here there was human contact and friendly relations.h.i.+ps among the employees, especially at the working level-a kind of blue-collar solidarity that was in some ways surprising. As it happened, Zaitzev was allowed to pa.s.s without inspection and made his way into the capacious square, then walked to the metro station.

He didn't usually dress in the paramilitary uniform-most KGB employees did not choose to do so, as though their employment might make them seem tainted to their fellow citizens. Neither did he hide it. If anyone asked, he gave an honest answer, and the questioning usually stopped there, because everyone knew that you didn't ask questions about what went on at the Committee for State Security. There were occasional movies and TV shows about KGB, and some of them were even fairly honest, though they gave little away concerning methods and sources beyond what some fiction writer might imagine, which wasn't always all that accurate. There was a small office at The Centre that consulted on such things, usually taking things out and-rarely-putting accurate things in, because it was in his agency's interest to be fearful and forbidding to Soviet citizens and foreigners alike. How many ordinary citizens supplement their incomes by being informers? Zaitzev wondered. He almost never saw any dispatches about that-that sort of thing rarely went overseas.

The things that did go out of the country were troubling enough. Colonel Bubovoy would probably be in Moscow the next day. There was regular air service between Sofia and Moscow through Aeroflot. Colonel G.o.derenko in Rome had been told to sit down and shut up, and to forward to The Centre the Pope's appearance schedule for the indefinite future. Andropov hadn't lost interest in that bit of information.

And now the Bulgarians would be involved. Zaitzev worried about that, but he didn't need to wonder all that much. He'd seen those dispatches before. The Bulgarian State Security Service was the loyal va.s.sal of KGB. The communicator knew that. He'd seen enough messages go to Sofia, sometimes through Bubovoy, sometimes directly, and sometimes for the purpose of ending someone's life. KGB didn't do much of that anymore, but Dirzhavna Sugurnost did, on occasion. Zaitzev imagined that they had a small subunit of the DS officers who were trained and skilled and practiced at that particular skill. And the message header had the 666 suffix, so this dispatch concerned the same thing that Rome had been initially queried on. So this was going forward.

His agency-his country-wanted to kill that Polish priest, and that, Zaitzev thought, was probably a bad thing.

He took the escalator down to the subterranean station amid the usual afterwork crowd. Usually, the crowd of people was comforting. It meant that Zaitzev was in his element, surrounded by his countrymen, people just like himself, serving one another and the State. But was that true? What would these people think of Andropov's mission? It was hard to gauge. The subway ride was usually quiet. Some people might talk to friends, but group discussions were rare, except perhaps for some unusual sporting event, a bad referee's call at a soccer match, or a particularly spectacular play on the hockey rink. Other than that, people were usually alone with their thoughts.

The train stopped, and Zaitzev shuffled aboard. As usual, there were no seats available. He grasped the overhead handrail and kept thinking. Are the others on the train thinking as well? If so, about what? Jobs? Children? Wives? Lovers? Food? You couldn't tell. Even Zaitzev couldn't tell, and he'd seen these people-these same people-on the metro for years. He knew only a few names, mainly given names overheard in conversations. No, he knew them only by their favorite sports teams....

It struck him suddenly and hard how alone he was in his society. How many real friends do I have? Zaitzev asked himself. The answer was shockingly few. Oh, sure, there were people at work he chatted with. He knew the most intimate details about their wives and children-but friends in whom he could confide, with whom he could talk over some troubling development, to whom he could go for guidance in a troubling situation . . . No, he didn't have any of those. That made him unusual in Moscow. Russians often made deep and close friends.h.i.+ps, and consecrated them often enough with the deepest and sometimes the darkest of secrets, as though daring one of their intimates to be a KGB informer, as though courting a trip to the Gulag. But his job denied him that. He'd never dare to discuss the things he did at work, not even to his coworkers.

No, whatever problems he had with this 666 series of messages were ones he had to work out for himself. Even his Irina couldn't know. She might talk with her friends at GUM, and that would surely be death for him. Zaitzev let out a breath and looked around....

There he was again, that American emba.s.sy official, reading Sovietskiy Sport and minding his own business. He was wearing a raincoat-rain had been forecast, but had not materialized-but not a hat. The coat was open, not b.u.t.toned or belted. He was less than two meters away....

On an impulse, Zaitzev s.h.i.+fted his position from one side of the car to the other, switching hands on the overhead rail as though to stretch a stiff muscle. That move put him next to the American. And, on further impulse, Zaitzev slid his hand into the raincoat pocket. There was nothing in there, no keys or pocket change, just empty cloth. But he had established that he could reach into this American's pocket and remove his hand without notice. He backed away, sweeping his eyes around the subway car to see if anyone had noticed or had even been looking his way. But . . . no, almost certainly not. His maneuver had gone undetected, even by the American.

FOLEY DIDN'T EVEN let his eyes move as he read to the bottom of the hockey article. Had he been in New York or any other Western city, he would have thought that someone had just attempted to pick his pocket. Strangely, he didn't expect that here. Soviet citizens were not allowed to have Western currency, and so there was nothing but trouble to be gained in robbing an American on the street, much less picking his pocket. And KGB, which was probably still shadowing him, was most unlikely to do anything like that. If they wanted to lift his wallet, they'd use a two-man team, as professional American pickpockets did, one to delay and distract, and the other to make the lift. You could get almost anyone that way, unless the target was alerted, and staying alert for so long was a lot to ask, even of an expert professional spook. So you employed pa.s.sive defenses, like wrapping a rubber band or two around the wallet-simple, but very effective, and one of the things they taught you at The Farm, the sort of basic tradecraft that didn't announce "spy!" to everyone. The NYPD advised people to do the same thing on the streets of Manhattan, and he was supposed to look like an American. Since he had a diplomatic pa.s.sport and "legal" cover, theoretically, his person was inviolable. Not necessarily from a street thug, of course, and both the KGB and the FBI were not above having a highly trained street thug rough someone up, albeit within carefully thought-through parameters, lest things get out of control. The entire state of affairs made the Imperial Court of Byzantium look simple by comparison, but Ed Foley didn't make the rules.

Those rules now did not allow him to check his pocket or make the least sign that he knew that someone's hand had been in there. Maybe someone had dropped him a note-a notice of desire to defect, even. But why him? His cover was supposed to be as solid as a T-bill, unless someone in the emba.s.sy had made a very shrewd guess and then ratted him out.... But no, even then, KGB wouldn't tip their hand this quickly. They'd watch him for a few weeks at least, just to see what else he might lead them to. KGB played the game too skillfully for that sort of play, so, no, there wasn't much chance that whoever had searched his pocket was a Second Chief Directorate guy. And probably not a pickpocket, either. Then what? Foley wondered. He'd have to be patient to find out, but Foley knew a lot about patience. He kept on reading his newspaper. If it were someone who wanted to do a little business, why scare him off? At the very least, he'd let him feel clever. It was always useful to help other people feel smart. That way, they could continue their mistakes.

Three more stops before he got off the subway. Foley had known up front that it would be a lot more productive to ride it than to drive the car. That Mercedes was just too standout-ish for this place. It would make Mary Pat stand out, too, but to her way of thinking, that worked for her rather than against. His wife had brilliant field instincts, better than his, but she often scared him in her daring. It wasn't so much that Mary Pat was a risk-taker. Every member of the DO took risks. It was her relish for doing so that occasionally worried him. For him, playing with the Russians was part of the job. It was business, as Don Vito Corleone would have put it, not personal. But for Mary Patricia, it was as personal as h.e.l.l, because of her grandfather.

She'd l.u.s.ted to be part of CIA before they'd met in the Student Union at Fordham, and then again at the CIA recruiter's desk, and they'd hit it off soon after that. She'd already had her Russian-language skills. She could pa.s.s for a native. She could alter her accent for any region of the country. She could feign being an instructor in poetry at Moscow State University, and she was pretty, and pretty women had an advantage over everyone else. It was the oldest of prejudices, that the attractive among us had to be good people, that the bad people had to be ugly because they did ugly things. Men were especially deferential to pretty women, other women were less so, because they envied their looks, but even they were nice by instinct. So Mary Pat could skate on a lot of things, because she was just that pretty American girl, that ditsy blonde, because blondes were universally thought to be dumb, even here in Russia, where they were not all that uncommon. The ones here were probably natural blondes, too, because the local cosmetics industry was about as advanced as it must have been in twelfth-century Hungary, and there wasn't much Clairol Blond #100G in the local drugstores. No, the Soviet Union paid scant attention to the needs of its womenfolk, which led his mind to another question-why had the Russians stopped at only one revolution? In America there would have been h.e.l.l to pay for the lack of choices in clothes and cosmetics the women had here....

The train stopped at his station. Foley made his way to the door and walked to the escalator. Halfway up, his curiosity got the better of him. He rubbed his nose as though with a case of the sniffles, and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. He rubbed his nose with it and then shoved it in his coat pocket, which, he discovered, was empty. So what had that been all about? There was no telling. Just one more random event in a life filled with them?

But Edward Foley hadn't been trained to think in terms of random events. He'd continue this regular schedule, and be sure to catch this same subway train every day for a week or so, just to see if there might be a repeat.

ALBERT BYRD SEEMED a competent eye cutter. He was shorter and older than Jack. He had a beard, black and showing hints of gray-like a lot of beards in England, she'd noted. And tattoos. More than she'd ever encountered before. Professor Byrd was a skilled clinician, good with his patients, and a very adept surgeon, liked and trusted by his nursing team-always the sign of a good doc, Cathy knew. He seemed to be a good teacher, but Cathy already knew most of what he had to teach, and knew more about lasers than he did. The argon laser here was new, but not as new as the one at Hopkins, and it would be two weeks before they even had a xenon-arc laser, for which she was Wilmer Eye Inst.i.tute's best jockey at Hopkins.

The bad news was in the physical facilities. Health care in Britain was effectively a government monopoly. Everything was free-and, like everywhere in the world, you got what you paid for. The waiting rooms were far shabbier than Cathy was used to, and she remarked on it.

"I know," Professor Byrd said tiredly. "It's not a priority."

"The third case I saw this morning, Mrs. Dover, she'd been on the waiting list for eleven months-for a cataract evaluation that took me twenty minutes. My G.o.d, Albert, at home her family physician just calls my secretary and I see her in three or four days. I work hard at Hopkins, but not that hard."

"What would you charge?"

"For that? Oh . . . two hundred dollars. Since I'm an a.s.sistant professor at Wilmer, I come a little higher than a new resident." But, she didn't add, she was a d.a.m.ned sight smarter than the average resident, more experienced, and a faster worker. "Mrs. Dover is going to need surgery to correct it," she added. "Want me to do it?"

"Complicated?" Byrd asked.

She shook her head. "Routine procedure. About ninety minutes' work because of her age, but it doesn't look as though there should be any complications."

"Well, Mrs. Dover will go on the list."

"How long?"

"It's not an emergency procedure . . . nine to ten months," Byrd figured.

"You're kidding," Cathy objected. "That long?"

"That's about normal."

"But that's nine or ten months during which she can't see well enough to drive a car!"

"She won't ever see a bill," Byrd pointed out.

"Fine. She can't read the newspapers for the best part of a year. Albert, that's awful!"

"It's our national health-care system," Byrd explained.

"I see," Cathy said. But she didn't really. The surgeons here were proficient enough, but they did only a bit more than half the procedures she and her colleagues did at Hopkins-and she'd never felt overworked in the Maumenee Building. Sure, you worked hard. But people needed you, and her job was to restore and improve the sight of people who required expert medical care-and to Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS, that was a religious calling. It wasn't that the local docs were lazy, it was just that the system allowed-nay, encouraged-them to take a very laissez-faire att.i.tude toward their work. She'd arrived in a very new medical world, and it wasn't all that brave.

Neither had she seen a CAT scanner. They'd essentially been invented in Britain by EMI, but some bean counter in the British government-the Home Office, they'd told her-had decided that the country only needed a few of them, and so most hospitals lost the lottery. The CAT scan had just come into being a few years before she'd entered the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, but in the ensuing decade they'd become as much a part of medicine as the stethoscope. Practically every hospital in America had one. They cost a million dollars apiece, but the patient paid for the use of the things, and they paid themselves off quickly enough. She only rarely needed one-to examine tumors around the eye, for example-but when you did, you d.a.m.ned well needed it right now!

And at Johns Hopkins, the floors were mopped every day.

But the people had the same needs, and she was a doc, and that, Cathy decided, was that. One of her medical school colleagues had gone to Pakistan and come back with the kind of experience in eye pathologies that you couldn't get in a lifetime in American hospitals. Of course, he'd also come back with amoebic dysentery, which was guaranteed to lessen anyone's enthusiasm for foreign travel. At least that wouldn't happen here, she told herself. Unless she caught it in a doctor's waiting room.

CHAPTER 9.

SPIRITS.

THUS FAR, Ryan had not managed to catch the same train home as his wife, always managing to get home later than she did. By the time he got home, he'd be able to think about doing some work on his Halsey book. It was about 70 percent done, with all the serious research behind him. He just had to finish the writing. What people never seemed to understand was that this was the hard part; researching was just locating and recording facts. Making the facts seem to come together in a coherent story was the difficult part, because human lives were never coherent, especially a hard-drinking warrior like William Frederick Halsey, Jr. Writing a biography was more than anything else an exercise in amateur psychiatry. You seized incidents that happened in his life at randomly selected ages and education levels, but you could never know the little key memories that formed a life-the third-grade schoolyard fight, or the admonishment from his maiden aunt Helen that resonated in his mind for his entire life, because men rarely revealed such things to others. Ryan had such memories, and some of them appeared and disappeared in his consciousness at seemingly random intervals, when the message from Sister Frances Mary in Second Grade at St. Matthew's School leaped into his memory as though he were seven years old again. A skilled biographer seemed to have the ability to simulate such things, but it sometimes came down to making things up, to applying your own personal experiences to the life of another person and that was . . . fiction, and history wasn't supposed to be fiction. Neither was an article in a newspaper, but Ryan knew from his own experience that much purported "news" was made up from whole cloth. But n.o.body ever said that writing a biography was easy. His first book, Doomed Eagles, had been in retrospect a much easier project. Bill Halsey, Fleet Admiral, USN, had fascinated him since reading the man's own autobiography as a boy. He'd commanded naval forces in battle, and while that had seemed exciting to a boy of ten years, it was positively frightening to a man of thirty-two, because now he understood the things that Halsey didn't discuss in full-the unknowns, having to trust intelligence information without really knowing where it came from, how it was gathered, how it was a.n.a.lyzed and processed, how it was transmitted to him, and whether or not the enemy was listening in. Ryan was now in that loop, and having to wager his life on the work that he did himself was frightening as h.e.l.l-rather more so, actually, to be wagering the lives of others whom he might or, more likely, might not know.

There was a joke he remembered from his time in the Marine Corps, Ryan thought, as the green English countryside slid past his window: The motto of the intelligence services was "We bet your life." That was now his business. He had to wager the lives of others. Theoretically, he might even come up with an intelligence estimate that risked the fate of his country. You had to be so d.a.m.ned sure of yourself and your data....

But you couldn't always be sure, could you? He'd scoffed at many official CIA estimates to which he'd been exposed back at Langley, but it was a d.a.m.ned sight easier to spit on the work of others than it was to produce something better yourself. His Halsey book, tentatively t.i.tled Fighting Sailor, would upset a few conventional-wisdom apple carts, and deliberately so. Ryan thought that the conventional thinking in some areas was not merely incorrect, but stuff that could not possibly be true. Halsey had acted rightly in some cases where the all-seeing eye of hindsight had castigated him for being wrong. And that was unfair. Halsey could only be judged responsible for the information that was available to him. To say otherwise was like castigating doctors for not being able to cure cancer. They were smart people doing their best, but there were some things they didn't know yet-they were working like h.e.l.l to find them out, but the process of discovery took time then, and it was still taking time now, Ryan thought. Was it ever. And Bill Halsey could only know what he was given, or what a reasonably intelligent man might deduce from that information, given a lifetime of experience and what he knew of the psychology of his enemy. And even then the enemy did not willingly cooperate in his own destruction, did he?

That's my job, all right, Ryan thought behind blank eyes. It was a quest for Truth, but it was more than that. He had to replicate for his own masters the thinking processes of others, to explain them to his own superiors, so that they, Ryan's bosses, could better understand their adversaries. He was playing pshrink without a diploma. In a way, that was amusing. It was less so when you considered the magnitude of the task and the potential consequences of failure. It came down to two words: dead people. In the Basic School at Quantico Marine Base, they'd hammered the same lesson home often enough. Screw up leading your platoon, and some of your Marines don't go home to their mothers and wives, and that would be a heavy burden to carry on your conscience for the rest of your life. The profession of arms attached a large price tag to mistakes. Ryan hadn't served long enough to learn that lesson for himself, but it had frightened him on quiet nights, feeling the roll of the s.h.i.+p on her way across the Atlantic. He'd talked it over with Gunny Tate, but the sergeant-then an "elderly" man of thirty-four-had just told him to remember his training, trust his instincts, and to think before acting if he had the time, and then warned that you didn't always have the luxury of time. And he'd told his young boss not to worry, because he seemed pretty smart for a second lieutenant. Ryan would never forget that. The respect of a Marine gunnery sergeant didn't come cheaply.

So he had the brains to make good intelligence estimates and the guts to put his name behind them, but he had to be d.a.m.ned sure they were good stuff before he put them out. Because he was betting the lives of other people, wasn't he?

The train slowed to a stop. He walked up the steps, and there were a few cabs topside. Jack imagined they had the train schedule memorized.

"Good evening, Sir John." Jack saw it was Ed Beaverton, his morning pickup.

"Hi, Ed. You know," Ryan said, getting into the front seat for a change. Better legroom. "My name is actually Jack."

"I can't call you that," Beaverton objected. "You're a knight."

"Only honorary, not a real one. I do not own a sword-well, only my Marine Corps one, and that's back home in the States."

"And you were a lieutenant, and I was only a corporal."

"And you jumped out of airplanes. d.a.m.ned if I ever did anything that stupid, Eddie."

"Only twenty-eight times. Never broke anything," the taxi driver reported, turning up the hill.

"Not even an ankle?"

"Just a sprain or two. The boots help with that, you see," the cabbie explained.

"I haven't learned to like flying yet-d.a.m.ned sure I'll never jump out of an airplane." No, Jack was sure, he never would have opted for Force Recon. Those Marines just weren't wired right. He'd learned the hard way that flying over the beach in helicopters was scary enough. He still had dreams about it-the sudden sensation of falling, and seeing the ground rush up-but he always woke up just before impact, usually lurching up to a sitting position in the bed and then looking around the darkened bedroom to make sure he wasn't in that d.a.m.ned CH-46 with a bad aft rotor, falling to the rocks on Crete. It was a miracle that he and a lot of his Marines hadn't been killed. But his had been the only major injury. The rest of his platoon had gotten away with nothing worse than sprains.

Why the h.e.l.l are you thinking about that? he demanded of himself. It was more than eight years in his past.

They were pulling up in front of the house in Grizedale Close. "Here we are, sir."

Ryan handed him his fare, plus a friendly tip. "The name's Jack, Eddie."

"Yes, sir. I'll see you in the morning."

"Roger that." Ryan walked off, knowing he'd never win that battle. The front door was unlocked in antic.i.p.ation of his arrival. His tie went first, as he headed to the kitchen.

"Daddy!" Sally fairly screamed, as she ran to his arms. Jack scooped her up and gave and got a hug. "How's my big girl?"

"Fine."

Cathy was at the stove, fixing dinner. He set Sally down and headed to his wife for a kiss. "How is it," her husband asked, "that you're always home first? At home you're usually later."

"Unions," she replied. "Everybody clocks out on time here, and 'on time' is usually pretty early-not like Hopkins." Where, she didn't add, just about everyone on the professional staff worked late.

"Must be nice to work bankers' hours."

"Even dad doesn't leave his office this early, but everybody over here does. And lunch means a full hour-half the time away from the hospital. Well," she allowed, "the food's a little better that way."

"What's for dinner?"