by Tom Clancy
“Sorry.” He softened his grip to provide nothing more than support. “Hmph. Has something changed here?”
“It took you this long to notice?” The smile broadened a tad. “It’s a shame that I have to go through this for that to happen.”
“Have you ever heard me complain? Everything about you has always been A-plus. I guess pregnancy drops you to a B-minus. But only in one subject,” he added.
“You’ve been teaching too long, Professor.” Her teeth were showing now. Cathy leaned back, rubbing her skin against her husband’s hairy chest. For some reason she loved to do that.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You glow.”
“Well, I have to glow my way to work.” Jack didn’t move his hands. “I have to get dressed, Jack.”
“‘How do I love thee, let me count the ways ...”’ he murmured into her damp hair. “One ... two ... three ...”
“Not now, you lecher!”
“Why?” His hands moved very gently.
“Because I have to operate in three hours, and you have to go to spook city.” She didn’t move, though. There weren’t all that many moments that they could be alone.
“I’m not going there today. I got stuck with a seminar at the Academy. I’m afraid the department is a little miffed with me.” He kept looking in the mirror. Her eyes were closed now. Screw the department... “God, I love you!”
“Tonight, Jack.”
“Promise?”
“You’ve sold me on the idea, okay? Now I—” She reached up to grab his hands, pulled them downward, and pressed them against the taut skin of her belly.
He—the baby was definitely a he, insofar as that was what they called him—was wide awake, rolling and kicking, pushing at the dark envelope that defined his world.
“Wow,” his father observed. Cathy’s hands were over his, moving them about every few seconds to follow the movements of the baby. “What does that feel like?”
Her head leaned back a fraction. “It feels good—except when I’m trying to sleep or when he kicks my bladder during a procedure.”
“Was Sally this—this strong?”
“I don’t think so.” She didn’t say that it wasn’t the sort of thing you remember in terms of strength. It was just the singular feeling that your baby is alive and healthy, something that no man would ever understand. Not even Jack. Cathy Ryan was a proud woman. She knew that she was one of the best eye surgeons around. She knew that she was attractive, and worked hard to keep herself that way; even now, misshapen by her pregnancy, she knew that she was carrying it well. She could tell that from her husband’s biological reaction, in the small of her back. But more than that, she knew that she was a woman, doing something that Jack could neither duplicate nor fully comprehend. Well, she told herself, Jack does things I don’t much understand either. “I have to get dressed.”
“Okay.” Jack kissed the base of her neck. He took his time. It would have to last until this evening. “I’m up to eleven,” he said as he stepped back.
She turned. “Eleven what?”
“Counting the ways,” Jack laughed.
“You turkey!” She swung her bra at him. “Only eleven?”
“It’s early. My brain isn’t fully functional yet.”
“I can tell it doesn’t have enough of a blood supply.” The funny thing, she thought, was that Jack didn’t think he was very good-looking. She liked the strong jaw, except when he forgot to shave it, and his kind, loving eyes. She looked at the scars on his shoulder, and remembered her horror as she’d watched her husband run into harm’s way, then her pride in him for what he had accomplished. Cathy knew that Sally had almost died as a direct result, but there was no way Jack could have foreseen it. It was her fault, too, she knew, and Cathy promised herself that Sally would never play with her seat belt again. Each of them had paid a price for the turns their lives had taken. Sally was almost fully recovered from hers, as was she. Cathy knew it wasn’t true of her husband, who’d been awake through it all while she slept.
When that happened, at least I had the blessing of unconsciousness. Jack had to live through it. He’s still paying that price for it, she thought. Working two jobs now, his face always locked into a frown of concentration, worrying over something he can’t talk about. She didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but she was certain that it was not yet done.
The medical profession had unexpectedly given her a belief in fate. Some people simply had their time. If it was not yet that time, chance or a good surgeon would save the life in question, but if the time had come, all the skilled people in the world could not change it. Caroline Ryan, MD, knew that this was a strange way for a physician to think, and she balanced the belief with the professional certainty that she was the instrument which would thwart the force that ruled the world—but she had also chosen a field in which life-and-death was rarely the issue. Only she knew that. A close friend had gone into pediatric oncology, the treatment of children stricken with cancer. It was a field that cried out for the best people in medicine, and she’d been tempted, but she knew that the effect on her humanity would be intolerable. How could she carry a child within her while she watched other children die? How could she create life while she was unable to prevent its loss? Her belief in fate could never have made that leap of imagination, and the fear of what it might have done to her psyche had turned her to a field that was demanding in a different way. It was one thing to put your life on the line—quite another to wager your soul.
Jack, she knew, had the courage to face up to that. This, too, had its price. The anguish she occasionally saw in him could only be that kind of question. She was sure that his unspoken work at CIA was aimed at finding and killing the people who had attacked her. She felt it necessary, and she would shed no tears for those who had nearly killed her little girl, but it was a task which, as a physician, she could not herself contemplate. Clearly it wasn’t easy for her man. Something had just happened a few days ago. He was struggling with whatever it was, unable to discuss it with anyone while he tried to retain the rest of his world in an undamaged state, trying to love his family while he labored ... to bring others to their death? It could not have come easily to him. Her husband was a genuinely good man, in so many ways the ideal man—at least for me, she thought. He’d fallen in love with her at their first meeting, and she could recount every step of their courtship. She remembered his clumsy—in retrospect, hilarious—proposal of marriage, the terror in his eyes as she’d hesitated over the answer, as though he felt himself unworthy of her, the idiot. Most of all, she remembered the look on his face when Sally had been born. The man who had turned his back on the dog-eat-dog world of investments—the world that since the death of her mother had made her father into a driven, unhappy man—who had returned to teaching eager young minds, was now trapped in something he didn’t like. But she knew that he was doing his best, and she knew just how good his best was. She’d just experienced that. Cathy wished that she could share it, as he occasionally had to share with her the depression following a failed procedure. As much as she had needed him a few painful weeks past, now he needed her. She couldn’t do that—or could she?
“What’s been bothering you? Can I help?”
“I can’t really talk about it,” Jack said as he knotted his tie. “It was the right thing, but not something you can feel very good about. ”
“The people who—”
“No, not them. If it was them ...” He turned to face his wife. “If it was them, I’d be all smiles. There’s been a break. The FBI—I shouldn’t be telling you this, and it doesn’t go any farther than this room—they found the gun. That might be important, but we don’t know for sure yet. The other thing—well. I can’t talk about that at all. Sorry. I wish I could.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong?” His face changed at that question.
“No. I’ve thought that one over the past few days. Remember the time you had to take that lady’s eye out? It
was necessary, but you still felt pretty bad about it. Same thing.” He looked in the mirror. Sort of the same thing.
“Jack, I love you and I believe in you. I know that you’ll do the right thing.”
“I’m glad, babe, because sometimes I’m not so sure.” He held out his arms and she came to him. At some French military base in Chad, another young woman was experiencing something other than a loving embrace, Ryan thought. Whose fault is that? One thing for sure, she isn’t the same as my wife. She’s not like this girl of mine.
He felt her against himself, felt the baby move again, and finally he was sure. As his wife had to be protected, so did all the other wives, and all the children, and all the living people who were judged as mere abstractions by the ones who trained in those camps. Because they weren’t abstractions, they were real. It was the terrorists who had cast themselves out of the civilized community and had to be hunted down one way or another. If we can do it by civilized rules, well and good—but if not, then we have to do the best we can, and rely on our consciences to keep us from going over the edge. He thought that he could trust his conscience. He was holding it in his arms. Jack kissed his wife gently on the cheek.
“Thanks. That’s twelve.”
The seminar led to the final two weeks of classes which led in turn to final exams and Commissioning Week: yet another class of midshipmen graduated to join the fleet, and the Corps. The plebes were plebes no longer, and were finally able to smile in public once or twice per day. The campus became quiet, or nearly so, as the underclassmen went home for brief vacations before taking cruises with the fleet, and preparing for Plebe Summer, the rough initiation for a new class of mids. Ryan was incongruously trapped in his real job for a week, finishing up a mountain of paperwork. Neither the Academy’s history department nor the CIA was very happy with him now. His attempt to serve two masters had not been a total success. Both jobs, he realized, had suffered somewhat, and he knew that he’d have to choose between them. It was a decision that he consciously tried to avoid while the proof of its necessity piled up around him.
“Hey, Jack!” Robby came in wearing his undress whites.
“Grab a seat, Commander. How’s the flying business?”
“No complaints. The kid is back in the saddle,” Jackson said, sitting down. “You should have been up in the Tomcat with me last week. Oh, man, I’m finally back in the groove. I was hassling with a guy in an A-4 playing aggressor, and I ruined his day. It was so fine.” He grinned like a lion surveying a herd of crippled antelope. “I’m ready!”
“When do you leave?”
“I report for duty 5 August. I guess I’ll be heading out of here on the first.”
“Not before we have you and Sissy over for dinner.” Jack checked his calendar. “The thirtieth is a Friday. Seven o’clock. Okay?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“What’s Sissy going to do down there?”
“Well, they have a little symphony in Norfolk. She’s going to be their number-two piano soloist, plus doing her teachin’ on the side.”
“You know they have the in-vitro center down there. Maybe you guys can have a kid after all.”
“Yeah, Cathy told her about that. We’re thinking about it, but—well, Sissy’s had a lot of disappointments, you know?”
“You want Cathy to talk to her about it some more?”
Robby thought about that. “Yeah, she knows how. How’s she making out with this one?”
“She’s bitching about her figure a lot,” Jack chuckled. “Why is it that they never understand how pretty they look pregnant?”
“Yeah.” Robby grinned his agreement, wondering if Sissy would ever look the same way to him. Jack felt guilty for touching a sensitive topic, and changed the subject.
“By the way, what’s with all the boats? I saw a bunch of yardbirds parked on the waterfront this morning.”
“That’s ‘moored,’ you dumb jarhead,” Robby corrected his friend. “They’re replacing the pilings over at the naval station across the river. It’s supposed to take two months. Something went wrong with the old ones—the preservative didn’t work or some such bullcrap. Your basic government-contractor screwup. No big deal. The job’s supposed to be finished in time for the next school year—not that I care one way or another, of course. By that time, boy, I’ll be spending my mornings at twenty-five thousand feet, back where I belong. What are you going to be doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re either gonna be here or at Langley, right?”
Ryan looked out the window. “Damned if I know. Rob, we got a baby on the way and a bunch of other things to think about.”
“You haven’t found ’em yet?”
Jack shook his head. “We thought we had a break, but it didn’t work out. These guys are pros, Robby.”
Jackson reacted with surprising passion. “Bull-shit, man! Professionals don’t hurt kids. Hey, they want to take a shot at a soldier or a cop, okay, I can understand that—it ain’t right, but I can understand it, okay?—soldiers and cops have guns to shoot back with, and they got training. So it’s an even match, surprise on one side and procedure on the other, and that makes it a fair game. Going after noncombatants, they’re just fucking street hoods, Jack. Maybe they’re clever, but they sure as hell ain’t professionals! Professionals got balls. Professionals put it on the line for-real.”
Jack shook his head. Robby was wrong, but he knew of no way to persuade his friend otherwise. His code was that of the warrior, who had to live by civilized rules. Rule Number One was: You don’t deliberately harm the helpless. It was bad enough when that happened by accident. To do so on purpose was cowardly, beneath contempt; those who did so merited only death. They were beyond the pale.
“They’re playing a goddamned game, Jack,” the pilot went on. “There’s even a song about it. I heard it at Riordan’s on St. Patrick’s Day. ‘I’ve learned all my heroes and wanted the same/To try out my hand at the patriot game.’ Something like that.” Jackson shook his head in disgust. “War isn’t a game, it’s a profession. They play their little games, and call themselves patriots, and go out and kill little kids. Bastards. Jack, out in the fleet, when I’m driving my Tomcat, we play our games with the Russians. Nobody gets killed, because both sides are professionals. I don’t much like the Russians, but the boys that fly the Bears know their stuff. We know our stuff, and both sides respect the other. There’s rules, and both sides play by ’em. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
“The world isn’t that simple, Robby,” Jack said quietly.
“Well, it damned well ought to be!” Jack was surprised at how worked up his friend was about this. “You tell those guys at CIA: find ’em for us, then get somebody to give the order, and I’ll escort the strike in.”
“The last two times we did that we lost people,” Ryan pointed out.
“We take our chances. That’s what they pay us for, Jack.”
“Yeah, but before you toss the dice again, we want you over for dinner.”
Jackson grinned sheepishly. “I won’t bring my soap box with me, I promise. Dressy?”
“Robby, am I ever dressy?”
“I told ’em it wasn’t dressy,” Jack said afterward.
“Good,” his wife agreed.
“I thought you’d say that.” He looked up at his wife, her skin illuminated by moonlight. “You really are pretty.”
“You keep saying that—”
“Don’t move. Just stay where you are.” He ran his hand across her flanks.
“Why?”
“You said this is the last time for a while. I don’t want it to be over yet.”
“The next time you can be on top,” she promised.
“It’ll be worth waiting for, but you won’t be as beautiful as you are now.”
“I don’t feel beautiful at the moment.”
“Cathy, you are talking to an expert,” her husband pronounced. “I am the one person in this house
who can give out a dispassionate appraisal of the pulchritude of any female human being, living or dead, and I say that you are beautiful. End of discussion. ”
Cathy Ryan took her own appraisal. Her belly was disfigured by gross-looking stretch marks, her breasts were bloated and sore, her feet and ankles swollen, and her legs were knotting up from her current position. “Jack, you are a dope.”
“She never listens,” he told the ceiling.
“It’s just pheromones,” she explained. “Pregnant women smell different and it must tickle your fancy somehow or other.”
“Then how come you’re beautiful when my nose is stuffy? Answer me that!”
She reached down to twist her fingers in the hair on his chest. Jack started squirming. It tickled. “Love is blind.”
“When I kiss you, my eyes are always open.”
“I didn’t know that!”
“I know,” Jack laughed quietly. “Your eyes are always closed. Maybe your love is blind, but mine isn’t.” He ran his fingertips over her abdomen. It was still slick from the baby oil she used to moisturize her skin. Jack found this a little kinky. His fingertips traced circles on the taut, smooth surface.
“You’re a throwback. You’re something out of a thirties movie.” She started squirming now. “Stop that.”
“Errol Flynn never did this in the movies,” Jack noted, without stopping that.
“They had censors then.”
“Spoilsports. Some people are just no fun.” His hands expanded their horizons. The next target was the base of her neck. It was a long reach, but worth the effort. She was shivering now. “Now, I, on the other hand ...”
“Mmmmm. ”
“I thought so.”
“Uh-oh. He’s awake again.”
Jack felt him almost as soon as his wife. He—she, it—was rotating. Jack wondered how a baby could do that, without anything to latch on to, but the evidence was clear, his hands felt a lump shift position. The lump was his child’s head, or the opposite end. Moving. Alive. Waiting to be born. He looked up to see his wife, smiling down at him and knowing what he felt.