currently used on the battlefield. This highly secret research gives us the power to shape the most lethally effective military force the world has ever experienced.'
The implications of Baaker's presentation and those of LaHaye, McGovern, and the General twisted like a knife slash in Dan Gabriel's gut. He had heard vague rumors of dissenters, including his distant cousin Rick Gabriel, who warned that unspeakable horrors lurked beneath the growing enthusiasm for drugs like Xantaeus. The Pentagon establishment had done an effective job at silencing those voices who accused the drug of issuing in the era of the 'chemical soldier' and creating a farm of warfare that would turn every battle into its own holocaust and destroy the very essence of what it means to be human.
But like others in the military, Gabriel had paid scant attention and given no real thought to those critics, preferring to believe the day of the nondepleting neurotrop would never come and decisions would never need to be made. But the day had clearly come, and he would now have to decide what was right.
CHAPTER 13
I had died, gone to hell, and was doomed to spend an eternity attending funerals in the freezing cold.
This time I stood far from center stage, out toward the edge of a crowd that jammed Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church's ragged little cemetery north of Greenwood. A brilliant sun had chased away the winter frost and loosened the buttons on overcoats and jackets. Among the hundreds of people there to say good-bye to Vanessa Thompson, some wore $5,000 suits and arrived on private jets. Others mourned in their Wal-Mart Sunday best worn so often the elbows shone when the sun hit them just right. I watched expensively citified celebrities with their surgically enhanced beauty literally rubbing elbows with entire families of tough, enduring people whose hard-won wisdom was sculpted in the deeply lined geography of timeworn faces. Despite the multitude, people spoke so quietly I could clearly hear the distant sounds of an old 'Popping Johnny' John Deere tractor and the slamming of a screen door in some distant house.
I turned toward the sun and squinted as I held up my face to its light, trying to let it into the winter darkness that clouded my heart and chilled my soul. It failed miserably.
Here I stood as a footnote in the crowd, a grain of salt amid the pepper, relegated to the fringe less for my pale complexion than for my lack of familial, personal, political, or professional standing.
I had been to this cemetery once before, to visit the grave of blues legend Robert Johnson, who, myth has it, met the devil on a Delta crossroads somewhere nearby and sold his soul in exchange for his unholy excellence on the guitar.
As the final hymn drifted over the heads of Vanessa's mourners, I heard the low murmur of a single-engine prop biplane that resurrected a distant memory of riding in the back of Al Thompson's pickup down some dusty road at Mossy Plantation when the crop dusters would fly right over our heads and leave us lightly frosted with DDT powder.
Faces in the crowd turned expectantly upward as one, toward a vintage, fabriccovered Stearman PT-17 Kaydet biplane painted bright red. The old military trainers from the mid-1920s had been all over the Delta when I was a child. From a lengthy New York Times article, we all knew the Stearman was owned and piloted by Vanessa's daughter; Jasmine, who had almost become a commercial airline pilot before being pulled into her mother's irresistible orbit of law and power.
The Times article noted that even as a child, Jasmine had been something of an aviation prodigy, winning competitions and the respect of adults many decades her senior by designing and building advanced radio-controlled model aircraft that enabled her to obtain three patents by the time she was thirteen. But by then, she had moved on to earning a license to fly real aircraft.
Because her mother's offer of financial assistance with college came with law school strings attached, Jasmine-having inherited her mother's headstrong temperament-refused the money and had put herself through school by flying a news helicopter for a series of Los Angeles television stringers and freelancers before finally landing a slot with one of the network affiliates.
All of this came back clearly and easily as the biplane emerged over the treetops so low and slow I was certain it would simply fall out of the sky. Instead it made a lazy, tight circle as only a biplane can do in the hands of an expert pilot, then loosed a dense shower of rose petals, filling the sky with color and the air with fragrance. The Stearman dipped its wings, then vanished as the brilliant petals drifted to earth.
No one moved until long after the sound of the Stearman's engine had faded, such was the shock, the depth of loss, and the reluctance to leave a wonderful woman behind. Then we all began to drift reluctantly away.
I thought I had said good-bye to Vanessa and the past. I was wrong.
CHAPTER 14
Standing at the wheel of my sailboat, I marveled at the smoky orange remains of a late June sun as it sank beneath the horizon, leaving behind a hazy Southern California sky painted with shifting pastels of peach, terra- cotta, and a strange smoky rose that worked its way through violet into the black approach of night.
The deck of the sloop Jambalaya hummed smoothly beneath my feet as I steered her on a port tack, heading straight toward the beach at Playa Del Rey. Night sifted down swiftly now, filling in all the spaces between the shadows. I reached through the spokes of the wheel and turned on the running lights. I kept a close eye for the idiots who had no clue about lights and for the legitimate Sunday-evening traffic as well. As the traffic to my port side opened up, I eased the Jambalaya's bow through the eye of the gentle wind. When the big 135 Genoa headsail began luffing, I hauled in on the port jib sheet wrapped three coils around the self-tailing winch, and trimmed it in. The main brought the boom around and filled itself with the air coming over the starboard bow.
On my new tack, roughly northwest, the lights marking the breakwater protecting the main channel into Marina del Rey made faint halos in the evening haze. The chatter on the VHF grew louder and more urgent as a jam of private watercraft clotted at the narrow harbor entrance.
As the Jambalaya gathered speed on its new tack away from the traffic, urgent, angry shouts echoed from the harbor entrance, shouts so loud they carried across the water, arriving like an echo moments after the same sound on the radio. Instants later the sound of crumpling fiberglass made it across the distance. Repairmen and insurance adjusters always had plenty of work on Mondays in Southern California, where the benign summer weather enticed too many Trafalgar wannabes into water way over their heads.
With my course steady for a moment and no traffic ahead, I gazed back toward Catalina and tried to recall the memories of Camilla and of the weekends we had spent there. In the beginning, it was the two of us, lazy weekends anchored at Fourth of July Cove, with walks in the hills and steaks at Bombard's at the Isthmus. Nate's birth and Lindsey's two years later changed all that, and as they grew older, there was snorkeling, swimming, and hiking around the Catalina hills, chasing after wild pigs and feral dreams. But as I squinted into the gathering night, Catalina's Bactrian hills were darkly indistinct against the flatness of dusk. Much like my memories.
I tried to recall other Sunday nights like this one, filled with songs and jokes delighting us during the six or eight hours' upwind return sail. In the first few months after the accident, memories of these return trips and the weekends preceding them came to me all too clearly and brightly, because throughout our marriage-but especially after the kids were born-Camilla had endlessly implored me to 'make a memory.' She'd hit me with this especially when we'd watch the children at play or as they slept and we realized they would grow up fast and one day leave the child-and us-behind.
Make a memory. How could Camilla know it would become a curse? The memory I once made of Lindsey haunted me most of all. One afternoon shortly before she turned five, she was dancing by herself in her bedroom in the little bungalow we had in Playa Del Rey. I don't remember the music now, but when I went in and picked her up and danced with her in my arms, I saw the most transcendent, undiluted joy in her eyes and a steady gaze of absolutely trusting love, which rocked my heart down to my soul. As we danced and I hugged her tight in my arms, a bittersweet revelation shook me that one day, some young man would see the same look and feel the same irresistible attraction in her eyes. I remembered praying then that this young man would treasure Lindsey's gaze
