by Tom Clancy
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 I told 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 Sarah 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!”
“I 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 high-backed 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 Spirit of 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 ha
ve their systems full of chemical shit that never should have made it outside a goddamned 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 probtems—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.