'Don't try it!' the petty officer shouted onto the 'guard' frequency.
'What?' Tomlinson asked quickly.
Don't do it! Oreza's mind shouted, suddenly alone in a tiny world, reading the other's mind and revolting at the thought it held. This was no way for things to end. There was no honor in this.
Kelly eased his rudder right to catch the bow wave, his eyes watching the foaming forefoot of the freighter. When the moment was right, he put the rudder over. The radio squawked. It was Portagee's voice, and Kelly smiled hearing it. What a good guy he was. Life would he so lonely without men such as he.
Springer lurched to starboard from the force of the radical turn, then even more from the small hill of water raised by the freighter's bow. Kelly held on to the wheel with his left hand and reached with his right for the air tank around which he'd strung six weight belts, Jesus, he thought instantly as Springer went over ninety degrees, Ididn'tcheck the depth. What if the water's not deep enough - oh, God... oh, Pam...
The boat turned sharply to port. Oreza watched from only a hundred yards away, but the distance might as well have been a thousand miles for all the good it did, and his mind saw it before reality caught up: already heeling hard to the right from the turn, the cruiser rode up high on the curling bow-wave of the freighter and, crosswise to it, rolled completely over, her white hull instantly disappearing in the foaming forefoot of the cargo ship... It was no way for a seaman to die.
Forty- One-Bravo backed down hard, rocking violently with the passage of the ship's wake as she came to a stop. The freighter stopped at once, too, but it took fully two miles, and by that time Oreza and his cutter were poking through the wreckage. Searchlights came on in the gathering darkness, and the eyes of the coastguardsmen were grim.
'Coast Guard Forty-One, Coast Guard Forty-One, this is US Navy sailboat on your port beam, can we render assistance, over?'
'We could use some extra eyes. Navy. Who's aboard?'
'Couple of admirals, the one talking's an aviator, if that helps.'
'Join in, sir.'.
He was still alive. It was as much a surprise to Kelly as if would have been to Oreza. The water here was deep enough that he and the air tank had plummeted seventy feet to the bottom. He fought to strap the tank to his chest in the violent turbulence of the passing ship overhead. Then he fought to swim clear of the descending engines and heavy gear from what had seconds earlier been an expensive cruiser. Only after two or three minutes did he accept the fact that he'd survived this trial by ordeal. Looking back, he wondered just how crazy he'd been to risk this, but for once he'd felt the need to entrust his life to judgment superior to his own, prepared to take the consequences either way. And the judgment had spared him. Kelly could see the Coast Guard hull over to the east... and to the west the deeper shape of a sailboat, pray God the right one. Kelly disengaged four of the weight belts from the tank and swam towards it, awkwardly because he had it on backwards.
His head broke the surface behind the sailboat as it lay to, close enough to read the name. He went down again. It took another minute to come up on the west side of the twenty-six-footer.
'Hello?'
'Jesus - is that you?' Maxwell called.
'I think so.' Well, not exactly. His hand reached up.
The doyen of naval aviation reached over the side, hauled the bruised and sore body aboard, and directed him below.
'Forty- One, this is Navy to your west now... this doesn't look real good, fella.'
'I'm afraid you're right. Navy. You can break off if you want. I think we'll stay a while,' Oreza said. It had been good of them to quarter the surface for three hours, a good assist from a couple of flag officers. They even handled their sailboat halfway decent. At another time he'd have taken the thought further and made a joke about Navy seamanship. But not now. Oreza and Forty-One-Bravo would continue their search all night, finding only wreckage.
It made the papers in a big way, but not in any way that made sense. Detective Lieutenant Mark Charon, following up a lead on his own time - on administrative leave following a shooting, no less - had stumbled into a drug lab and in the ensuing gun battle had lost his life in the line of duty while ending those of two major traffickers. The coincidental escape of three young women resulted in the identification of one of the deceased traffickers as a particularly brutal murderer, which perhaps explained Charon's heroic zeal, and closed a number of cases in a fashion that the police reporters found overly convenient. On page six was a squib story about a boating accident.
Three days later, a file clerk from St Louis called Lieutenant Ryan to say that the Kelly file was back but she couldn't say from where. Ryan thanked her for her effort. He'd closed that case along with the rest, and didn't even try the FBI records center for Kelly's card, and thus made unnecessary Bob Ritter's substitution of the prints of someone unlikely ever to visit America again.
The only loose end, which troubled Ritter greatly, was a single telephone call. But even criminals got one phone call, and Ritter didn't want to cross Clark on something like that. Five months later, Sandra O'Toole resigned her position at Johns Hopkins and moved to the Virginia tidewater, where she took over a whole floor of the area's teaching hospital on the strength of a glowing recommendation from Professor Samuel Rosen.
EPILOGUE
February 12, 1973
'We are honored to have the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances,' Captain Jeremiah Denton said, ending a thirty-four-word statement that rang across the ramp at Clark Air Force Base with 'God bless America.'
'How about that,' the commentator said, sharing the experience as he was paid to do. 'Right there behind Captain Denton is Colonel Robin Zacharias, of the Air Force. He's one of the fifty-three prisoners about whom we had no information until very recently, along with...'
John Clark didn't listen to the rest. He looked at the TV that sat on his wife's dresser in the bedroom, at the face of a man half a world away, to whom he'd been much closer in body, closer still in spirit not so long before. He saw the man embrace his wife after what had to be five years of separation. He saw a woman who'd grown old with worry, but now was young with love for the husband she'd thought dead. Kelly wept with them, seeing the man's face for the first time as a thing of animation, seeing the joy that really could replace pain, no matter how vast. He squeezed Sandy's hand so hard that he almost hurt it until she rested his on her belly to feel the movement of their soon-to-be firstborn. The phone rang then, and Kelly was angry for the invasion of the moment until he heard the voice.
'I hope you're proud of yourself, John,' Dutch Maxwell said. 'We're getting all twenty back. I wanted to make sure you knew that. It wouldn't have happened without you.'
'Thank you, sir.' Clark hung up. There was nothing else to be said.
'Who was that?' Sandy asked, holding his hand in place.
'A friend,' Clark said, wiping his eyes as he turned to kiss his wife. 'From another life.'
