? 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 highbacked 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 Spiritof 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
