It sounded like a wild-goose chase to Dean. He wouldn’t have minded so much, except for two things: one, Lia was working without backup, and two, he was so tremendously tired now that he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He gazed out the side of the aircraft at the green jungle, teetering on the edge of slumber. His mind wandered back and forth, confusing the thick foliage with Vietnam. They were worlds apart, and he was even further from the kid he’d been thirty-some years before. But they jammed close now in his head, his consciousness giving way to the dreamscape of memory.
Turk was the one who’d deserved the medal for taking out the Vietnamese sniper. Without Turk, Dean would have been another notch on the wooden stock of Fu Manchu’s ancient Russian weapon. Dean followed Turk out of the bunker area and through the hills, learning more in their first day together than he had during the entire year he’d been a Marine.
But Turk wasn’t around to get the medal. So it fell to Dean, who’d been the one to take the shot.
One shot, one kill, one shiny medal, one star in the firmament.
One certificate signifying you are the man.
Paper.
Was that why he was so cynical?
He wasn’t cynical. On the contrary. He valued honor and duty. He believed in them and lived them, did his best to — not for medals, not for anything of that, but because he felt sick, literally queasy, when he realized he’d let down someone who was counting on him.
Like Lia in Korea. Even though it wasn’t his fault — wasn’t even his mission. He’d been thousands of miles away at the time, but he still felt as if he should have been there for her.
Maybe it was medals he didn’t care for. He didn’t hold them against men who felt they were important. On the contrary — if he knew the man, especially if he knew the man, he took the medal as a sign that he’d been through hell and lost something important, trading it for something that couldn’t be explained. That experience set a person apart.
Didn’t make him better, just different.
Offered proof that he had been tested and come through.
That wasn’t cynicism.
Maybe it was just his own medals he didn’t care about, the way smart kids in school were about grades. Dean had been an OK student, but even his B’s came with considerable effort. One of his best friends, Mikey, yeah, good ol’ Mikey, he always got A’s, but just shrugged.
“Ain’t nothing.”
Mikey became an officer in the Army and died in a dumb accident in Panama two years before the invasion.
They didn’t give medals for that.
The shot that had killed Fu Manchu hadn’t been an accident. Skill, a good idea, a lot of patience, training, experience — Turk’s mostly — those made the shot, not luck.
There was luck involved, though. Dean had turned left at the edge of the stream a half hour earlier, when he wasn’t sure which way to go. Turn right, and things would have been different.
Not to mention the luck involved in not being in Fu Manchu’s sights.
“Beautiful country, huh?” said Fashona.
“From a distance, everything’s beautiful,” said Dean, his mind rising back to full consciousness.
“You never saw my first wife. You all right?”
“Just tired.”
“You want to sleep, go ahead.”
“It’s not that easy in a plane.”
Fashona glanced behind him. “Karr’s snorin’ up a storm back there.”
“Yeah.” Dean was surprised to see Karr sleeping, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. “He’s a piece of work.”
“Yeah, he’s a real asshole.”
Dean hadn’t meant it the way Fashona took it.
“I guess we all are sometimes,” he told the pilot.
The side of Fashona’s face turned bright red. “You aren’t, Charlie. And I hope I’m not.”
“You’re not, Ray. You’re just a damn good pilot.”
Fashona didn’t answer — or rather, if he did, Charlie Dean didn’t hear what he said; he surrendered to fatigue, slumbering against the side of the plane.
67
“There’s a problem with Lia’s helicopter,” said Rockman. “She’s not moving forward.”
“Are they landing?” asked Telach.
“I’m not sure. Her com system’s off.”
Telach glanced up at the map screen displayed at the front of the Art Room. Agents’ positions were tracked in two different ways. One was by a simple locator that worked with the communications satellites. It was similar to the global positioning technology embedded in many cell phones and 911 systems. Because it involved radio signals, however, it could be detected. Since field ops had the option of turning off communications for safety (and, Telach knew, to get the Art Room off their back), there was also a backup system using implanted radioactive isotopes. The system had technical limitations, but it was working now and showed Lia’s position about eighty miles north of La Oroya.
“She’s definitely not moving,” said Rockman. “Can’t tell if they’re in a hover or what. Maybe they landed. Map shows a village nearby.”
Telach leaned over to look at his screen. The locator showed they were about a half mile south of a settlement on the side of a mountain. The latest satellite image showed rough terrain, and it was an unlikely place to land.
One of the occupational hazards of working in the Art Room was something Telach called Mother Hen Disease — a tendency to worry that something had gone wrong simply because information had stopped flowing back. The field ops — Lia especially — were constantly complaining about it.
“What are the flying conditions?” Telach asked Rockman.
“Clear skies. Unlimited visibility.”
“How long has she been at this position?”
“Two minutes.”
“Call her on the sat phone. If she doesn’t answer, see which one of the U-2s is closest to her, and get it over the area.”
68
The security procedures seemed almost routine to Hernes Jackson now, and he donned a benign smile for the security people as he passed through their checks. Down in the Desk Three bunker, he found that he remembered the sign-in procedure for the computer networks without having to resort to the prompts or call the librarian for assistance.
A message popped up on the screen with a new assignment for Rubens: did any of the Peruvian guerrillas seem interesting in any way?
Amused by the broad, open-ended query, Jackson began paging through the accumulated files on the terrorists, including video clips from the discovery of the bomb and the attempted post office takeover several days before.
Nothing jumped out at him beyond the obvious: the guerrillas were more organized than the Peruvian
