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“Doing your best and having other people know it. You gotta be practical, kiddo. Something you’re not very good at—they don’t teach it in the ivory tower, right?”
Don’t rise to it, the inner voice said. This is as hard for him as for you. It was the old opposition. Style. Culture.
His father said, “Anyway, we’ll have a look at Naples together, okay?”
“Palma.”
“Your boat’s going to Palma; we’re making liberty at Naples. You’re on this boat, kid.”
“Oh, God! Dad, Kim’s meeting me at Palma!”
“Kim? The redhead with the big gazumbahs I met at Shakey’s with you?”
And he lost it. “Goddamit, Dad—!”
“Oh, sorry—I meant to say, ‘the young lady with the enormous intellect.’ Snake—Jackson, hey—”
He yanked his arm away. “Dad, Kim and I are practically engaged!”
His father gave him a strange look. His eyes stopped flicking up and down the passage. He took plenty of time, perhaps thinking of something and then deciding to say something else. “Like father, like son, huh?”
“You said it; I didn’t.” His father’s record with women was abysmal: he had been married twice, both failures, the first to Alan’s mother, the second to a fleshy woman named Thelma who had had huge breasts and the brain of an ant, although she had been smart enough to get out after eight months. Alan almost said, When I get married, I mean to stay that way, but he bit the words off. Instead, forcing himself to be calmer, he said, “You’re talking about somebody you don’t know anything about,” and his cheeks flamed.
His father made a face. “Sorry, she looked like Son of Thelma to me. Give me her address, I’ll get a message to her you’ll be in Naples.” Again, he looked at Alan strangely. “I think there’s a lot I don’t know about you all of a sudden.”
1311 Zulu. Langley, Virginia.
George Shreed heaved himself off his metal canes and into his chair, propping the canes against the desk, supported on a decorative turning that was faintly worn from years of such use. His shock of gray hair stood up on his head, rather startling, almost as if he had had it styled that way, looking not unlike the Nobel winner Samuel Beckett. He lit a cigarette and turned to the morning book—pages of already digested and analyzed intelligence, winnowed, prioritized, emphasized, and most of it crap, he thought. He flipped pages. One item caught his eye; unthinkingly, he put a little tick next to it. Moscow. Massacre in office building. At least thirty dead in military-style attack. Probable organized cime but target not clear. Spetsnaz-style execution of aged security guard. Unconfirmed dummy company. He looked back a page, then ahead, jumped to the Russian and area forecast section and again did not find what he wanted. “Sally!” he said harshly, pressing down a button. “We had a Not Seen on Yuri Efremov a couple days ago, Moscow. Get some details.” He returned to his briefing book.
1323 Zulu. Moscow.
The stink of fire and chemicals lay in the damp air even after the fire was out. A police detective, hands plunged into the pockets of his cheap ski jacket, stared gloomily at the building’s doorway as another body bag came down.
“Thirty-one,” the cop next to him said.
“How do you know it’s thirty-one? You’ve put the pieces together, have you?”
“Thirty-one bags.”
“Imbecile.” He crossed the wet street and pushed through the firemen. As an investigation, this was going to be a joke. What the firemen hadn’t bitched up, the bomb squad had. They’d be a week just working out how many dead they had.
“Hey, sir, that’s where they found the old man.” A plainclothes cop he knew pointed toward the floor near the far wall. “Back of the head, close range—typical stuff.”
Typical, my ass, he thought, it didn’t get to be typical until fucking Gorbachev showed up with his freedom and his shit. Aloud, he said, “Ex-mil.”
“Yes, sir.”
The detective trusted the man, knew him to be more or less honest, perceptive when he wasn’t too lazy to think. “So?” he said, bobbing his head toward the upstairs. Water, he saw, had spilled down the stairs and was leaking through the ceiling. Broken pipes.
“I seen it ten times in the last few years. You know. Ex-mil for hire, they’re fucking good at it, fucking Rambos. It’s mafia.” He had been talking to people in the building and could give a quick summary of what was up there—the big room with thin partitions, computers, lots of telephones, some kind of high-tech business. “So they wouldn’t pay off the gangsters, they got hit,” he said with a shrug.
“Computers? Western money?”
“I dunno. This is just what the people in the building say.”
It didn’t click for him. He was slower to reach conclusions but reached sounder ones when he did; maybe that’s why he was a detective. “Let’s have a look,” he said.
“Fucking mess up there.”
“No kidding.” He started up the stairs, keeping near the wall where there was less water.
1441 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.
Peretz had nothing for him yet, and he wandered down to the JO wardroom for lack of anything to do. Carriers are carriers, your own or somebody else’s: a lot of hours to kill. He wished he had work, or—He thought of Kim.
Narc was sitting alone at a table. Heading for him, Alan remembered Peretz’s fantasy about the girls’ team; he tried it here. Five pilots were laughing too loud a few feet away; another pair were muttering together with their heads close. Raise the pitch of the laughter, blur your eyes and give them longer hair—my god, it might work! He thought of Peretz’s edged description: insecurity, cliquishness, rivalry …
“Hey, Narc.”
“You know we’re gonna be on this boat for five fucking days?”
“I’m fine, thanks; how nice of you to ask. And how are you this morning?”
“I’m pissed off. I don’t have a dad to entertain me while I’m aboard, okay?”
“Okay, okay—sorry. Hey, I haven’t seen Rafe.”
Narc snorted. “Our pilot and senior chief have already left. Nice, huh? Skipper pulled them back the first chopper they could get. Isn’t that swell! They go, I stay.”
Alan, despite himself, tuned out the content, listened only to the tone; was this Peretz’s jealousy, preadolescent gossip? He was wondering if Narc could make it as an eleven-year-old girl when Narc leaned forward and said, “I think I’m a better pilot than Rafe—don’t you?”
“Rafe’s pretty good,” Alan muttered. He was trying to keep from chuckling, and Peretz’s imagery came to him. He let Narc jabber on; inside his own head he was crushing the image of the young girls. Such a petty revenge might be fine for a man who was leaving the Navy; it could only get Alan into trouble. He put the notion aside, thought instead of his father’s comments about his girl.
“Absolutely,” he said. That was all Narc demanded of him—sympathetic sounds.
“Right.”
His father had no right to speak to him like that, he thought, then saw that of course he had; what was galling was that it was such a cheap shot, especially from him. Alan had once heard his father referred to as “Mattress Mick,” knew he was a womanizer.
“You bet,” he said to Narc’s vaguely heard complaints.
He felt Narc actually liking him, warming to his support. “I mean,” Narc was saying, “I don’t take anything away from the guy; he put Christine into the net and didn’t total her. Good job. I give the fucker his due. But goddam it, it all started with him trying to land on the wrong boat. Jesus H. Christ! Is that first-class flying? Is it?”
“Well—”
“Right! And what’s his punishment? Do you know what his punishment is? Huh?”
“What?”
“He’s gotta buy a beer for everybody who repaints Christine. Huh? Get it?”
Alan didn’t get it. He supposed somebody would paint out the damage to Christine’s facelift—so what?
“Look, Spy, this is how it goes. When you put a plane on the wrong carrier and it needs work, they repaint it, see, with their logo and their markings. In effect, it’s a plane from this carrier’s S-3 squadron now. Get it? So then it gets sent home to our carrier and it has to be repainted again with our logo and our marks. See? Well, every officer and EM in the squadron will want a hand on a spraygun to say he helped, see, so Rafe has to buy beer for the squadron. Well, what the hell is that? A guy puts a plane down on the wrong boat and we wind up with a fucking beer party. Is that right?”
Narc was outraged. He was not the brightest guy ever to join the Navy, but he was not far from wrong in believing he had been born to fly. He wanted to be an astronaut. He took it all very seriously.
“Maybe we could reintroduce flogging,” Alan made the mistake of saying.
Narc stared at him, finally got it, said, “Your human interaction is piss-poor, did anybody ever tell you that? I’m saying this for your own good. You don’t get along.”
“Jeez, I thought I was loveable.”
“See? Always destructive digs. Now, my guess is you were never on a sports team. Am I right?”
“Actually, I was.”
Narc’s eyes narrowed. “What team?”
“Wrestling.”
“Wrestling! You wrestled?” Narc looked shocked. “Were you any good?”
Had he been any good? Mostly, he’d been a skinny kid too small for his age who’d spent his adolescence doing the things he most feared because he thought he was a coward—going in the winter without a coat, swimming across a lake at night, wrestling. He’d hated it, and so it had become even more important to do it. Had he been any good? “Nah,” he said.
For three years, he had learned all the holds, the takedowns and the escapes; he got so good at them that the coach had him teaching other wrestlers. But he was physically weak, and he hardly ever won a match. Then, in the summer after his junior year, he put on a spurt of growth and grew right into the weight class of the team’s best wrestler, the state runner-up. He never got into a match again, was a training partner for the good one. At the season’s end, the coach gave him a letter anyway, something he had desperately wanted, and that night he took it down to the Iowa River and dropped it in, because it was part of his code then that real rewards didn’t come for trying hard; they came for succeeding.
“I don’t see you wrestling,” Narc said.
Alan smiled at him. “Ever try it?”
“Jesus, no. The dumbest guys I ever knew were wrestlers.” Clearly, Alan had confused him. “Do it in college?”
Alan shook his head, laughing now. “I made sure I picked a college that didn’t have a wrestling team.” In fact, he’d picked a college that had no teams at all, only intramural sports. He had conducted his life like that in those days, with a rigid adolescent morality, rules, abrupt changes of direction. Ironically, he had put on bulk and muscle his first year in college and would then have been the wrestler he had wanted to be. He hadn’t realized that until, his second week in the squadron, he had been packed off to be the guinea pig for a new self-defense course put on by the Marines at Quantico. He had loved it, learned a lot about street-fighting, and had told the skipper it was great. Later, other officers, coming back limping and bruised, had accused him of being a practical joker.
“I played soccer and baseball,” Narc said, his tone indicating that these were real sports and that they gave him an authority Alan lacked. Narc went on to explain his theory of human interaction based on team experience. He ended by saying, “No offense, Craik, but the way I read it, you’re a loner, do you get my meaning?”
“You mean I’m a loner.”
“That’s right.”
“Wrestlers get like that. Four years in somebody else’s armpit, you want a little space.”
“You need to learn to interact. I bet you weren’t in a fraternity.”
“You’re right.”
“See? That’s where you really learn in college. Human skills. I paid a lot of attention to that side of it. You ever notice how I handle Rafe, for example?”
Alan hadn’t, but he said, “Mmmm,” in an appreciative way.
“That’s my point. You understand what I’m saying? You’re in his face all the time—like that shit with the BG and the radar. You made it sound like he had to do it because it was some big moral thing. I’d have made it a game, a team thing. See, it’s really a kind of management thing. Management skills. That’s what sports are all about. I expect to be an astronaut, right? That’s a team effort all the way. I’ll be way ahead in that department.”
“Afraid I’m a little late for a sports team.”
“Never too late to improve yourself. That’s one of my beliefs. I have a book I’d like you to read. Will you read it?”
Alan was surprised that Narc read any books at all. He said that of course he’d read it.
“It’ll change your life.”
Alan wondered if he wanted his life changed. That brought him somehow back to his father, then to a question as to whether all the changes he had made had simply been tacking back and forth across the unchangeable fact of being Mick Craik’s kid.
0420 Zulu. Langley, Virginia.
A bored clerk watched the low-level traffic feed in, now and then routing a message to file or analysis. Most of it, she knew, ended up somewhere in the attic of a mainframe computer, bytes on a chip that would be dust-covered from neglect if dust were allowed there. She yawned. Her eyes stung with fatigue. She sipped cold coffee.
Somebody had got herself murdered in Amsterdam. Big deal, she thought, you should live in DC. Hey, the somebody was a possible agent. She looked at the clock. Oh, Christ, she thought, four hours to go yet! A woman in Amsterdam. Yuck. Oh, gross. It made her slightly sick—a pregnant woman killed with a knife. Who does these things? “Lover of assistant naval attaché, Turkish mission.” That was it? One murder, one pair of hotpants. Big deal. She routed it toward the back burner.
16–19 March 1990. Mid-Atlantic.
Peretz was a born teacher. Alan learned more from him in four days, he thought, than he had in months of Navy schools. Peretz was crippled by a cynical wit, a submerged though very real arrogance. Yet he loved intelligence.
Once, in those four days, Alan said to him, “HUMINT’s a dying craft.” He had learned that in intelligence school: HUMINT—human intelligence, “spies,” was history; the future belonged to technology.
“Should I write that down?” Peretz had said. He had made this joke several times, pretending that Alan had said something so important it should be kept for posterity. “Jeez, I wish I had pen and paper. Maybe I can just commit it to memory. Now, how did it go? ‘HUMINT’s a dying craft.’ Boy, that’s really beautifully put.”
“Okay, you don’t agree.”
“Not me, sonny. It’s folks like the KGB—sorry, the SVRR. You think they have seven hundred thousand employees because they believe HUMINT’s a dead issue?”
“And look where they are. They lost. It’s over.”
“Communism lost, so HUMINT’s a dead issue. I think I missed a logical connection there someplace. Does your mind always work that way?”
Alan repeated to him some of the wisdom that he had learned in intelligence school, and Peretz laughed out loud at him. “Oh, to be young again!” he said. “Look, Al—” He had taken to calling him “Al,” a name he had hardly heard since high school. “—satellites are wonderful, spy planes are superb, NSA is the greatest organization of its kind in the world. But without the guy on the spot, they’re just fodder for the bean-counters. You need both, SIGINT and HUMINT. Americans love technology; for one thing, it’s expensive, and we trust things that cost a lot. Anything as cheap as a spy is immediately suspect to us. But you can really get hurt by old-fashioned human intelligence. How do you think the Soviets got the atomic bomb?”
“Forgive me, but I think your example says it all. That was more than forty years ago.” Alan chuckled; he knew Peretz well enough by then to be able to say, “Come on—spies?”
“Al, right now you’re in love with your computer and your radar. That’s fine. But I keep trying to tell you, you’re an intelligence officer. Be intelligent.” Peretz saw his skepticism. He sighed. “My greatest fear is, somebody’s going to plant an agent on me and I’ll be the unwitting means for some two-bit country to learn something that will hurt us—South Africa. France. Israel. One of the Arab states. You think I’m living in the past. Wrong end of the stick, chum: I’m living in the future. You wait until low-tech countries start going after our shit. You’ll see how important HUMINT is, in spades.” He shrugged. “Okay, so you need to grow up some. Come on, I’ll buy you a slider while you’re aging.”
They worked late together one day, running the new template through its paces. Alan knew he was good at it, had even proposed an improvement that Peretz fastened on to. Now, pleased with themselves, at ease with each other, they sipped cold coffee in the intelligence spaces, feet up.
“You know this is my last tour,” Peretz said.
Alan tried to think of a politic thing to say.
“Your dad told you I’m out, didn’t he?”
