by Tom Clancy
“So why are you in such a great mood, Cas?”
“This one goes in the wall safe, Dutch.” Podulski handed over a heavy folder. Its edges were bordered in red-and-white-striped tape, and it bore the coded designator BOXWOOD GREEN.
“They’re going to let us play with it?” That was a surprise.
“It took me till oh-three-thirty, but yes. Just a few of us, though. We have authorization for a complete feasibility study.” Admiral Podulski settled into a deep leather chair and lit up a cigarette. His face was thinner since the death of his son, but the crystal-blue eyes burned as bright as ever.
“They’re going to let us go ahead and do the planning?” Maxwell and Podulski had worked towards that end for several months, never in any real expectation that they’d be allowed to pursue it.
“Who’d ever suspect us?” the Polish-born Admiral asked with an ironic look. “They want us to keep it off the books.”
“Jim Greer, too?” Dutch asked.
“Best intel guy I know, unless you’re hiding one somewhere.”
“He just started at CIA, I heard last week,” Maxwell warned.
“Good. We need a good spy, and his suit’s still blue, last time I checked.”
“We’re going to make enemies doing this, lots of ’em.”
Podulski gestured at the window and the noise. He hadn’t changed all that much since 1944 and USS Essex. “With all those a hundred feet away from us, what’ll a few more matter?”
“How long have you had the boat?” Kelly asked about halfway through his second beer. Lunch was rudimentary, cold cuts and bread supplemented by bottled beer.
“We bought it last October, but we’ve only been running it two months,” the doctor admitted. “But I took the Power Squadron courses, finished top in my class.” He was the sort who finished number one in nearly everything, Kelly figured.
“You’re a pretty good line-handler,” he observed, mainly to make the man feel better.
“Surgeons are pretty good with knots, too.”
“You a doc, too, Ma’am?” Kelly asked Sarah.
“Pharmacologist. I also teach at Hopkins.”
“How long have you and your wife lived here?” Sam asked, and the conversation ground to an awkward halt.
“Oh, we just met,” Pam told them artlessly. Naturally enough it was Kelly who was the most embarrassed. The two physicians merely accepted the news as a matter of course, but Kelly worried that they’d see him as a man taking advantage of a young girl. The thoughts associated with his behavior seemed to race in circles around the inside of his skull until he realized that no one else seemed to care all that much.
“Let’s take a look at that propeller.” Kelly stood. “Come on.”
Rosen followed him out the door. The heat was building outside, and it was best to get things done quickly. The secondary bunker on the island housed Kelly’s workshop. He selected a couple of wrenches and wheeled a portable air compressor towards the door.
Two minutes later he had it sitting next to the doctor’s Hatteras and buckled a pair of weight belts around his waist.
“Anything I have to do?” Rosen asked.
Kelly shook his head as he stripped off his shirt. “Not really. If the compressor quits, I’ll know pretty quick, and I’ll only be down five feet or so.”
“I’ve never done that.” Rosen turned his surgeon’s eyes to Kelly’s torso, spotting three separate scars that a really good surgeon might have been skillful enough to conceal. Then he remembered that a combat surgeon didn’t always have the time for cosmetic work.
“I have, here and there,” Kelly told him on the way to the ladder.
“I believe it,” Rosen said quietly to himself.
Four minutes later, by Rosen’s watch, Kelly was climbing back up the ladder.
“Found your problem.” He set the remains of both props on the concrete dock.
“God! What did we hit?”
Kelly sat down for a moment to strip off the weights. It was all he could do not to laugh. “Water, doc, just water.”
“What?”
“Did you have the boat surveyed before you bought it?”
“Sure, the insurance company made me do that. I got the best buy around, he charged me a hundred bucks.”
“Oh, yeah? What deficiencies did he give you?” Kelly stood back up and switched the compressor off.
“Practically nothing. He said there was something wrong with the sinks, and I had a plumber check it, but they were fine. I guess he had to say something for his money, right?”
“Sinks?”
“That’s what he told me over the phone. I have the written survey somewhere, but I took the information over the phone.”
“Zincs,” Kelly said, laughing. “Not sinks.”
“What?” Rosen was angry at not getting the joke.
“What destroyed your props was electrolysis. Galvanic reaction. It’s caused by having more than one kind of metal in saltwater, corrodes the metal. All the sandbar did was to scuff them off. They were already wrecked. Didn’t the Power Squadron tell you about that?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“But—you just learned something, Doctor Rosen.” Kelly held up the remains of the screw. The metal had the flaked consistency of a soda cracker. “This used to be bronze.”
“Damn!” The surgeon took the wreckage in his hand and picked off a waferlike fragment.
“The surveyor meant for you to replace the zinc anodes on the strut. What they do is to absorb the galvanic energy. You replace them every couple of years, and that protects the screws and rudder by remote control, like. I don’t know all the science of it, but I do know the effects, okay? Your rudder needs replacement, too, but it’s not an emergency. Sure as hell, you need two new screws.”
Rosen looked out at the water and swore. “Idiot.”
Kelly allowed himself a sympathetic laugh. “Doc, if that’s the biggest mistake you make this year, you’re a lucky man.”
“So what do I do now?”
“I make a phone call and order you a couple of props. I’ll call a guy I know over in Solomons, and he’ll have somebody run them down here, probably tomorrow.” Kelly gestured. “It’s not that big a deal, okay? I want to see your charts, too.”
Sure enough, when he checked their dates, they were five years old. “You need new ones every year, doc.”
“Damn!” Rosen said.
“Helpful hint?” Kelly asked with another smile. “Don’t take it so seriously. Best kind of lesson. It hurts a little but not much. You learn and you get on with it.”
The doctor relaxed, finally, allowing himself a smile. “I suppose you’re right, but Sarah’ll never let me forget it.”
“Blame the charts,” Kelly suggested.
“Will you back me up?”
Kelly grinned. “Men have to stick together at times like this.”
“I think I’m going to like you, Mr. Kelly.”
“So where the fuck is she?” Billy demanded.
“How the hell should I know?” Rick replied, equally angry—and fearful of what Henry would say when he got back. Both their eyes turned to the woman in the room.
“You’re her friend,” Billy said.
Doris was trembling already, wishing she could run from the room, but there was no safety in that. Her hands were shaking as Billy took the three steps to her, and she flinched but didn’t evade the slap that landed her on the floor.
“Bitch. You better tell me what you know!”
“I don’t know anything!” she screamed up at him, feeling the burning spot on her face where she’d been hit. She looked over to Rick for sympathy, but saw no emotion at all on his face.
“You know something—and you better tell me right now,” Billy said. He reached down to unbutton her shorts, then removed the belt from his pants. “Get the rest in here,” he told Rick.
Doris stood without waiting for the order, nude from the waist down, crying silently, her
body shaking with sobs for the pain soon to come, afraid even to cower, knowing she couldn’t run. There was no safety for her. The other girls came in slowly, not looking in her direction. She’d known that Pam was going to run, but that was all, and her only satisfaction as she heard the belt whistle through the air was that she would reveal nothing that could hurt her friend. As searing as the pain was, Pam had escaped.
3
Captivity
After replacing all the diving gear in the machine shop, Kelly took a two-wheel hand truck out onto the quay to handle the groceries. Rosen insisted on helping. His new screws would arrive by boat the next day, and the surgeon didn’t seem in any hurry to take his boat back out.
“So,” Kelly said, “you teach surgery?”
“Eight years now, yeah.” Rosen evened up the boxes on the two-wheeler.
“You don’t look like a surgeon.”
Rosen took the compliment with grace. “We’re not all violinists. My father was a bricklayer.”
“Mine was a fireman.” Kelly started wheeling the groceries towards the bunker.
“Speaking of surgeons . . . ” Rosen pointed at Kelly’s chest. “Some good ones worked on you. That one looks like it was nasty.”
Kelly nearly stopped. “Yeah, I got real careless that time. Not as bad as it looks, though, just grazed the lung.”
Rosen grunted. “So I see. Must have missed your heart by nearly two inches. No big deal.”
Kelly moved the boxes into the pantry. “Nice to talk to somebody who understands, doc,” he noted, wincing inwardly at the thought, remembering the feel of the bullet when it had spun him around. “Like I said—careless.”
“How long were you over there?”
“Total? Maybe eighteen months. Depends on if you count the hospital time.”
“That’s a Navy Cross you have hanging on the wall. Is that what it’s for?”
Kelly shook his head. “That was something else. I had to go up north to retrieve somebody, A-6 pilot. I didn’t get hurt, but I got sicker n’ hell. I had some scratches—you know—from thorns and stuff. They got infected as hell from the river water, would you believe? Three weeks in the hospital from that. It was worse’n being shot.”
“Not a very nice place is it?” Rosen asked as they came back for the last load.
“They say there’s a hundred different kinds of snake there. Ninety-nine are poisonous.”
“And the other one?”
Kelly handed a carton over to the doctor. “That one eats your ass whole.” He laughed. “No, I didn’t like it there much. But that was the job, and I got that pilot out, and the Admiral made me a chief and got me a medal. Come on, I’ll show you my baby.” Kelly waved Rosen aboard. The tour took five minutes, with the doctor taking note of all the differences. The amenities were there, but not glitzed up. This guy, he saw, was all business, and his charts were all brand new. Kelly fished out another beer from his cooler for the doctor and another for himself.
“What was Okinawa like?” Kelly asked with a smile, each man sizing up the other, each liking what he saw.
Rosen shrugged and grunted eloquently. “Tense. We had a lot of work, and the kamikazes seemed to think the red cross on the ship made a hell of a nice target.”
“You were working while they were coming in at you?”
“Injured people can’t wait, Kelly.”
Kelly finished his beer. “I’d rather be shooting back. Let me get Pam’s stuff and we can get back in the air conditioning.” He headed aft and picked up her backpack. Rosen was already on the quay, and Kelly tossed the backpack across. Rosen looked too late, missed the catch, and the pack landed on the concrete. Some contents spilled out, and from twenty feet away, Kelly immediately saw what was wrong even before the doctor’s head turned to look at him.
There was a large brown plastic prescription bottle, but without a label. The top had been loose, and from it had spilled a couple of capsules.
Some things are instantly clear. Kelly stepped slowly off the boat to the quay. Rosen picked up the container and placed the spilled capsules back in it before snapping down the white plastic top. Then he handed it to Kelly.
“I know they’re not yours, John.”
“What are they, Sam?”
His voice could not have been more dispassionate. “The trade name is Quaalude. Methaqualone. It’s a barbiturate, a sedative. A sleeping pill. We use it to get people off into dreamland. Pretty powerful. A little too powerful, in fact. A lot of people think it ought to be taken off the market. No label. It’s not a prescription.”
Kelly suddenly felt tired and old. And betrayed somehow. “Yeah.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Sam, we only met—not even twenty-four hours ago. I don’t know anything about her.”
Rosen stretched and looked around the horizon for a moment. “Okay, now I’m going to start being a doctor, okay? Have you ever done drugs?”
“No! I hate the goddamned stuff. People die because of it!” Kelly’s anger was immediate and vicious, but it wasn’t aimed at Sam Rosen.
The professor took the outburst calmly. It was his turn to be businesslike. “Settle down. People get hooked on these things. How doesn’t matter. Getting excited doesn’t help. Take a deep breath, let it out slow.”
Kelly did, and managed a smile at the incongruity of the moment. “You sound just like my dad.”
“Firemen are smart.” He paused. “Okay, your lady friend may have a problem. But she seems like a nice girl, and you seem like a mensch. So do we try and solve the problem or not?”
“I guess that’s up to her,” Kelly observed, bitterness creeping into his voice. He felt betrayed. He’d started giving his heart away again, and now he had to face the fact that he might have been giving it to drugs, or what drugs had made of what ought to have been a person. It might all have been a waste of time.
Rosen became a little stern. “That’s right, it is up to her, but it might be up to you, too, a little, and if you act like an idiot, you won’t help her very much.”
Kelly was amazed by how rational the man sounded under the circumstances. “You must be a pretty good doc.”
“I’m one hell of a good doc,” Rosen announced. “This isn’t my field, but Sarah is damned good. It may be you’re both lucky. She’s not a bad girl, John. Something’s bothering her. She’s nervous about something, in case you didn’t notice.”
“Well, yes, but—” And some part of Kelly’s brain said, See!
“But you mainly noticed she’s pretty. I was in my twenties once myself, John. Come on, we may have a little work ahead.” He stopped and peered at Kelly. “I’m missing something here. What is it?”
“I lost a wife less than a year ago.” Kelly explained on for a minute or two.
“And you thought that maybe she—”
“Yeah, I guess so. Stupid, isn’t it?” Kelly wondered why he was opening up this way. Why not just let Pam do whatever she wanted? But that wasn’t an answer. If he did that, he would just be using her for his selfish needs, discarding her when the bloom came off the rose. For all the reverses his life had taken in the past year, he knew that he couldn’t do that, couldn’t be one of those men. He caught Rosen looking fixedly at him.
Rosen shook his head judiciously. “We all have vulnerabilities. You have training and experience to deal with your problems. She doesn’t. Come on, we have work to do.” Rosen took the hand truck in his large, soft hands and wheeled it towards the bunker.
The cool air inside was a surprisingly harsh blast of reality. Pam was trying to entertain Sarah, but not succeeding. Perhaps Sarah had written it off to the awkward social situation, but physicians’ minds arc always at work, and she was starting to apply a professional eye to the person in front of her. When Sam entered the living room, Sarah turned and gave him a look that Kelly was able to understand.
“And so, well, I left home when I was sixteen,” Pam was saying, rattling on in a monotonal voice that
exposed more than she knew. Her eyes turned, too, and focused on the backpack Kelly held in his hands. Her voice had a surprisingly brittle character that he’d not noticed before.
“Oh, great. I need some of that stuff.” She came over and took the pack from his hands, then headed towards the master bedroom. Kelly and Rosen watched her leave, then Sam handed his wife the plastic container. She needed only one look.
“I didn’t know,” Kelly said, feeling the need to defend himself. “I didn’t see her take anything.” He thought back, trying to remember times when she had not been in his sight, and concluded that she might have taken pills two or perhaps three times, then realizing what her dreamy eyes had really been after all.
“Sarah?” Sam asked.
“Three-hundred-milligram. It ought not to be a severe case, but she does need assistance.”
Pam came back into the room a few seconds later, telling Kelly that she’d left something on the boat. Her hands weren’t trembling, but only because she was holding them together to keep them still. It was so clear, once you knew what to look for. She was trying to control herself, and almost succeeding, but Pam wasn’t an actress.
“Is this it?” Kelly asked. He held the bottle in his hands. His reward for the harsh question was like a well-earned knife in the heart.
Pam didn’t reply for a few seconds. Her eyes fixed on the brown plastic container, and the first thing Kelly saw was a sudden, hungry expression as though her thoughts were already reaching for the bottle, already picking one or more of the tablets out, already anticipating whatever it was that she got from the damned things, not caring, not even noting that there were others in the room. Then the shame hit her, the realization that whatever image she had tried to convey to the others was rapidly diminishing. But worst of all, after her eyes swept over Sam and Sarah, they settled on Kelly again, oscillating between his hand and his face. At first hunger vied with shame, but shame won, and when her eyes locked on his, the expression on her face began as that of a child caught misbehaving, but it and she matured into something else, as she saw that something which might have grown into love was changing over an interval of heartbeats into contempt and disgust. Her breathing changed in a moment, becoming rapid, then irregular as the sobs began, and she realized that the greatest disgust was within her own mind, for even a drug addict must look inward, and doing so through the eyes of others merely added a cruel edge.
