'There was this girl. Sharyl Fitzroy.'
'Fitzroy! Not-'
'Yeah. The traditional admiral's daughter. I don't think he cared for having a lowly lieutenant commander date his daughter, but she was the independent type, y'know? Anyway. I was the one with the promising career and all that, right?
'One night I took her to the Kennedy Center. She loved the opera. There was a performance of La Bohme.' He said nothing more for a time. Pamela waited quietly. After a time, he continued. 'Afterwards, we went out for a walk, down by the Potomac. A moonlight stroll, and all that. We were…
attacked. Punks out joy-riding. Washington… Washington's got the highest crime rate in the country, did you know that?'
She nodded.
'There were three of them. They knocked me down, took my wallet. One of them grabbed her… dragged her off. They had a van parked nearby.'
Pamela realized with a start that the man was crying. 'It doesn't sound like something you could've helped.'
He shook his head. 'We shouldn't have been off by ourselves. Away from the crowds. Away from the lights. Bad judgment… at least that's what the admiral said later.' His fists clenched. 'Damn it, I was there on the ground begging for my life while they… while they…' He stopped again, and drew a long, ragged breath. 'One of them shot me. It just grazed my scalp, but I guess in the dark and with all the blood they thought I was dead. They left me out there on the ground while they took turns with her in the van. Then they shot her, tossed her out. The police found us the next day.'
'You were wounded. There was nothing you could have done anyway!'
'Maybe.' He sounded bitter. 'But I Played dead, lay there and didn't make a sound. I thought… I thought maybe they'd let her go afterwards, but they killed her.
'So I got branded as a coward.'
'I don't understand. Why?'
He looked at her as though trying to decide whether or not she was joking. 'Let's just put it down to the Navy's old-boy network,' he said, finally. 'Admiral Fitzroy had lost his only daughter, and I was the… the fucking wimp who played dead while she was murdered. I got transferred real fast after that. Probably a good thing. Fitzroy might have shot me himself.'
Slowly, he rubbed his mustache. 'But the word was out, y'know? This man had gone as far as he can go in the Navy. Oh, nothing official, you understand. I was even assigned a squadron skipper's slot aboard Jefferson.
Wouldn't do to have a former CO get taken down a peg. But it was damn clear I wasn't going anywhere anymore.
'I suppose the real revelation came during the Wonsan crisis. My whole squadron was held in reserve, while VF-95 went in to tangle with MiGs. You… you've got to understand, Miss Drake. A Navy aviator spends his whole life training for the moment when he can strap on an airplane and go up against MiGs, one on one. Most men never have that chance.
'And I didn't either.'
'You think Admiral Magruder has it in for you? That he chose his own nephew instead of you?'
There was a long silence. 'I don't know. Maybe not. It seemed like it at the time. And something… something happened on a flight a few days ago.
Up by the Burmese border. I did something stupid, see. Something I shouldn't have done. CAG came down on me like a ton of laser-guided ordnance, and I got relieved. It felt… it felt just like the bastards had been waiting all that time just to see me busted.' He looked at her. 'Like I said, pretty cruddy, right?
'The worst of it is, it looks like they were right. All of them. I broke. Maybe endangered my boat, my shipmates. I lost it.' He looked away towards the woods beyond the cage. 'Maybe I never had it.'
She didn't answer for a long moment. 'Made It? Back in that warehouse.
When they were questioning you. Was that why you told them you'd talk?'
'What do you mean?'
She couldn't help feeling that Bayerly must have been reacting on some level to what was happening to her, comparing it with what had happened to Sharyl Fitzroy. But he looked so shaken now. Maybe it was best not to dig too deeply.
'Never mind,' she said. 'Made It?' She pressed herself closer. 'Hold me?'
Gently, almost reluctantly, he put his arm around her shoulders.
She'd thought they were going to stay there at the rebel camp all day, but less than an hour later, uniformed men arrived in jeeps and began shouting orders. Soldiers kicked out fires, others gathered weapons.
And then Pamela and Bayerly were again on their way north.
Tombstone leaned against the guardrail and looked out to sea. The wake foamed out beneath his feet, spreading astern all the way to the horizon. The sky overhead was a clear and piercing blue, but there was still a dirty, oily tang to the air, the smell of burned rubber, plastic, and paint. He had the fantail to himself. The entire crew, it seemed, had turned to in the cleanup, making Jefferson shipshape again after the attack and fire. He could hear the thump and bang of repair crews working in the hangar bay, the sounds echoing down the open machine shop passageway at his back.
His debriefing, the preliminary part of it anyway, was over. It had been routine and automatic, a recounting of what had happened at the hotel, and afterwards, at the Kiong Toey warehouse. Made It Bayerly's betrayal had been duly recorded. And it was a betrayal… whether the information which had led to the attack on Jefferson had come from him or from the three sailors butchered by Hsiao earlier. At the very least, Bayerly had provided Hsiao with the confirmation he'd needed, and quite possibly he'd provided details the sailors could not have known.
They were going to nail Made It if they ever found the guy again. Nail him… and why? He'd tried to stop them from hurting Pamela. The thought of what might be happening to the two of them at that moment made him shudder.
It felt as though he'd just reached a new low. He'd abandoned Pamela and Bayerly. And while he'd run in order to warn the carrier, the fact was that he'd run… leaving Pamela and a brother aviator behind. Hardly the behavior expected of a hero.
Slowly, he reached up and unzipped the breast pocket of his flight suit, where a small lump of metal pressed against his chest. He pulled out the medal which he had retrieved from its case in his cabin only minutes earlier.
The Navy Cross. It lay in his palm, catching the afternoon sun, the blue and white ribbon bright and clean in the light. His fingers closed over it.
He was no hero. Tombstone knew that, knew it to his very bones, and all of the medals, all of the television interviews on Earth would not make things different. Heroes were men like his father who had laid their lives on the line trying to drop a bridge in downtown Hanoi.
Tombstone remembered his feelings during the Wonsan op. Half the time he'd been too busy to think, riding on pure training and instinct, and the rest of the time he'd been scared to death. Landing a damaged Tomcat on the carrier with his RIO wounded in the backseat… hell, what else could he have done?
He looked at the medal again. If it hadn't been for the hero nonsense, maybe none of this would have happened. Tombstone would have been flying the recon out of U Feng, not Batman. It would have been him in the jungle… and maybe Pamela would never have been involved.
He opened his fingers and looked at the medal again. Almost… almost he cocked his arm to hurl the bit of metal and cloth out into the pale blue wake.
Something held him back. Throwing away the medal would change nothing, accomplish nothing.
That, he realized, was what was gnawing at him more even than anything else. Pamela and Bayerly were gone and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. Tracking the captives through Bangkok's teeming streets was a job for the hard-pressed That National Police, not the U.S. Navy.
With a start, he glanced at his watch. Almost a quarter past… and an all-departments meeting had been called for 1030 hours. He just had time to make it up to CVIC. He pocketed the medal, then turned away from the
