"This adventure appears to have got us nothing, Mister Craik!" Admiral Pilchard's face was grim. "You get shot up, Special Agent Dukas takes a bullet, we engage two Chinese aircraft and shoot them down for you -- and you bring back nothing! Do you know what the Director of Naval Intelligence has to say about that?"

His voice faded in Alan Craik's head as it all came back: Pakistan, night, blood...

When a shot from the darkness severed the sniper's spine, they were sprayed with blood. Mike Dukas crouched next to Alan and then moved a step, and the Chinese officer spun and fired his pistol into Dukas's chest from five meters away, knocking him back. Alan raised his good arm and brought the sight down one-handed, leaning forward as Dukas recoiled. He shot once and the officer stumbled back and caught himself against the ruined Islamic prayer screen; he raised his own gun again and then flew forward as a rifle shot from the darkness hit him.

Dukas staggered up and forward. He fell to his knees beside George Shreed, the traitor they had chased all this way....

The admiral's voice stabbed through the memory: "Mister Craik, I'm sorry for your injury, but what in the name of God did you think you were doing?"

Alan grunted, more an acknowledgment that the admiral had been speaking than a reply. He sat there like a whipped dog, his uniform rumpled, his head down, his injured left hand a white mitten of bandage -- two fingers gone. And, as the admiral said, for what?

"We caught a spy, sir. A damned important spy. A traitor." Alan's tone was flat.

"Yes, and I understand he's been comatose since you brought him back and he's going to die within twenty-four hours, and he hasn't said a word! Craik, you can break the rules when you bring back the gold ring, but when you come back empty--!" When Alan didn't respond, Pilchard looked at a stone-faced officer who had come over from ONI to sit in on this chewing-out, then back at Alan, and he said almost kindly, "Didn't this guy Shreed say anything while you had him, Commander? Nothing?"

Had Shreed said anything? Alan had desperately wanted Shreed to say things. He had felt his head reeling as his hand had bled, but he had leaned over Shreed and tried to get him to explain....

"Why?" Alan had gasped. "I want to know why. Why did you do it?"

"Do what?" A smile in Shreed's voice, as if he were saying, What, this little thing, these deaths, this meeting a thousand miles from nowhere? "This op? Because I could. None of those other dickheads had -- intestinal--" Shreed rolled a little as if to rise on his elbow, and gasped, falling back so hard his head hit the paving. He wasn't smiling now. He had at least three bullets in him, and Alan was trying to get answers from him before he died.

"You weren't running an op. You betrayed people."

"China -- won't trouble -- us--"

"China--!"

"Dickheads. Idiots..." The voice trailed off.

Alan was aware that Pilchard had been talking again, had stopped. Alan said, "No, he didn't say anything, sir. Not anything that made any sense."

Pilchard looked at him hard, and Alan realized that he'd lost track and that now he was responding to something already past. Pilchard had the furious look of a senior officer who wasn't being listened to. "Maybe you need to take six months off," Pilchard growled. "You're not what I'd call rational."

"Sir, once I'm back on the boat--"

"You're not going back to the boat! Goddamit, Craik, look at yourself! Your uniform's a mess, you look like an old man, you can't concentrate--! Get a grip on yourself!"

Alan touched his bandages. They were really there so he couldn't see the hand. As if not seeing it denied its reality. "I need work, sir, not six months off." Pilchard looked aside at the man from ONI, and Alan got the message: ONI wanted to see a flogging. "We went to get Shreed, and we got him," he said stubbornly.

The ONI man said, "And he hasn't said zip. You got nothing."

"What did you bring the Chinese?" Alan had said then to the dying Shreed. There were a dozen dead Chinese soldiers around the old mosque, and the Chinese officer who had shot Dukas was lying with his head a foot from Shreed's. Alan thought that Shreed had brought Navy secret codes to give to the Chinese. "What did you bring them?"

Shreed gurgled, turned his head, and spat blood against the wall. "Poison. Brought Chen -- poison--" Shreed's head turned, seemed to merge with the Chinese officer's in the darkness, their faces as close as two lovers'.

"He's your control? He's running you?" Alan leaned within inches of Shreed's ear, trying to force the answers from him.

"Chen?" Shreed snarled. He made the name sound like a dirty word. "Never -- never--! The money--!" Shreed closed his eyes. His chest heaved, and Alan thought he was laughing. He wheezed and coughed, then quieted, and there was a silence. "You taking me home?" Shreed whispered.

"If we make it."

"You think you're heroes, but you don't -- understand--" Shreed's voice faded. Alan heard the rasping breath in the darkness. Abruptly, the voice came back, loud now. "I'll have a monument -- like -- Bill Casey. You'll see -- who the hero -- is--"

The wheezing cough came again as if he were laughing, but he wasn't laughing.

The admiral was looking at a photograph of the President on his wall and talking again. "Your 'traitor' was an important man with important friends at the CIA. They deny that he was a spy, and they're saying that the Navy made a huge mistake. And you broke a lot of rules in doing it."

"Shreed said he'd be a hero."

"And to them he is! He's got a big cheering section over there." Pilchard glanced at the ONI man, who nodded gloomily. "Alan, you and this man Dukas broke a lot of rules. When you break the rules, you better come back with a diamond in your hand, or you're in the deepest shit in the world."

But Alan went on, like a drunk who doesn't hear what's said to him. "Shreed said he'd be a hero! What the hell, he was a traitor. Why would he be a hero?"

"You're not listening, Commander--!"

"They'll come back at us," Alan said. He sat up a little straighter.

"What?"

"The Chinese. They have to come back at us."

"Come back how?"

"Revenge. Like street gangs. They'll take a shot at us."

Pilchard wasn't interested in street gangs. He nodded at the ONI officer; clearly, it was his time to talk, and it had all been arranged before the chewing-out had started. The ONI man said, "Our office would be happier if Shreed had lived to talk. Or if you'd got the Chinese officer -- Shreed's control. Chou?"

"Chen."

Shreed saying, contempt in his voice, when Alan had asked if the Chinese officer was his control, "Chen?" as if "Chen" were a word for shit.

"Yeah. We think that if we could get this Chen, we could salvage something here. What happened to him?"

"I was pretty much out of it by then." Meaning that his civilian friend Harry and Harry's assassin girlfriend had had another agenda, and they had been the only good guys left standing at the end of the fight, so they had got whatever was left of Chen.

"If we had him, we'd bury Shreed's buddies over at the Agency." The ONI man, a full captain, shook his head. "Is Chou alive, do you think?"

"Chen. It's Chen."

"Okay, whatever! If there's a chance that sonofabitch is still alive, we want to know. That would be something, if we could bring him in. Commander, you hearing me?"

Alan was hearing a sound and couldn't place it, a distant drone. He was trying to say something to Dukas but he couldn't hear, and then it was too late to ask anything, and the blood was draining out of him and he wondered if the sound was the aircraft that was supposed to lift them out.

"Money," Alan said now to Admiral Pilchard. "Shreed said something about money. When he was talking about Chen and poison. I wanted to ask him about it, but then the aircraft came and--"

Alan stared at the wall of the Pentagon office, still hearing the S-3 that had come to take them out of Pakistan, still smelling the blood and feeling the wound in his hand. He'd thought that he had done some of the best work of his life, and now he was being read out for it. He wanted Pilchard, who was a damned good officer and a "sea daddy" to him sometimes, to say that he and Dukas had done a hell of a job and it wasn't their fault that Shreed hadn't talked. He wanted him to say that Alan should go back to sea and take over command of his detachment again. But what the admiral was dealing with was not Alan Craik, but a turf war between ONI and the CIA, with the Navy looking bad because one of its officers had broken a lot of rules to capture a man who could, in death, be made to wear a hero's halo.

"If you know anything about what happened to this Chen, Commander, you better come out with it--quick." The ONI captain leaned in on Alan, and Pilchard waved him off with a shake of the head.

"Maybe I can find out," Alan said. Maybe. Maybe Harry and Anna had nursed Chen back to life and were having picnics with him in Bahrain. Maybe Alan's lost fingers would grow back, too.

"Don't maybe me. Find out." The captain leaned away from him out of deference to the admiral, but he sounded threatening.

Admiral Pilchard stood to show the meeting was over. Alan looked him in the eye. "I'm sorry, sir," he said. "I did what I thought was right."

The admiral gave him a bleak little smile. "The Navy goes by results, Commander."

Out in the corridor, the captain grabbed his arm. He was a big man who used his size to awe people. "Come up with a diamond, Mister Craik," he snarled. "Come up with a diamond, or you're going to be one early-out lieutenant-commander."

Copyright © 2003 by Gordon Kent