“Why not just sign off for them now, then?”
“Because they’re not in my possession, and that’s what I have to sign for.” He looked up, grinned. “It’s the law.”
“You know, Craik, you’re the most arrogant cocksucker I’ve ever had to serve with.” He sounded almost genial.
Alan finished signing and pushed the orders across the desk. Later, he would wish he had thought to say, Clearly, I don’t have your experience with cocksuckers, but he didn’t. “You’ll miss your flight if you don’t hurry, sir,” is what he said.
Suter stared into his face, Alan into his. Finally, Suter uncrossed his arms, picked up the orders, and straightened. “Jesus, I’m glad I’m leaving the Navy,” he said. He started out. “I hope you fall on your ass trying to do my job, Craik.”
Alan stopped by the mail slots and found a letter from his wife, which he read in the quiet of the maintenance office, with Senior Chief Prue thoughtfully giving him some space. Everything was good at home—Mikey was growing like a weed; the dog had eaten part of a sweater Rose’s mother had knitted specially; Rose thought she had a line on a great posting for her next tour, some project called Peacemaker. He headed for a briefing with a grin on his face.
Near Atlanta, Georgia.
Mike Dukas was thoroughly pissed. He had just taken part in a bust that was supposed to be a big coup for the FBI and his own agency, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and all they had got was an empty house, five hours of tedium, and a U-Haul full of computers and computer disks. Never mind that the disks were loaded with pornography; nobody knew that yet, and, anyway, the porn wouldn’t have any significance to him for months.
And it was all Alan Craik’s fault. No, be honest; not Craik’s fault—his fault, his, Mike Dukas’s. It was the frayed end of an old operation that had started with Al Craik years before, and Dukas couldn’t let go of it. In part because he was nuts about Craik’s wife. And thought of Craik himself as a very, very close friend.
Oh shit. Dukas felt lousy. A day wasted, and for what?
He sat in his rental car and thought about driving to the airport and waiting for the plane and flying back to DC and having nothing to report. What was he accomplishing, anyway? And what waited for him at home—three AWOL sailors, five domestic disputes, two incidents of racial hatred? This was what a Navy cop did?
So he took from his pocket a letter he had just got from Craik and read it over again, and he was envious. It was all about some raid Craik had been on in Bosnia, shooting and everything. Helos! Grenades! Prisoners! And what the hell was Dukas doing? Sitting on his ass in a rental car and mooning over a busted operation.
And a line that went right to the heart. Mike, it’s you guys they need there, not me. They need law.
It was like an order from a friend: Get involved.
But how?
Well, he was a cop—a Navy cop, sure, but a cop. They must need good cops in Bosnia. They must have criminals. War criminals. Hey, there was an idea. Catching war criminals—what could be a more honorable duty for a cop than that?
War criminals. Now, who was hiring cops to go after war criminals?
He started the car. The UN. No, it wasn’t the UN who went after war criminals; it was the World Court. Somebody he knew must know somebody over there. Somebody—
Langley, Virginia.
At CIA headquarters, a man who disliked Alan Craik as fiercely as Dukas and O’Neill liked him was, for a moment, thinking about Alan. His mind flicked over the subject of the young naval officer on its way somewhere else—flicked, felt distaste, moved on. Alan Craik was one of his failures: he’d tried to recruit Craik, had told him only a little lie, and Craik had gone all moral on him and humiliated him. The little shit.
George Shreed leaned on his stainless steel canes, looking down from the window of his new corner office and, after touching Craik as you’d touch a sore spot and flinching away, thinking that it was time to do something big. Something really big. A riiiillly big shew, as that asshole used to say on television.
He had been kicked upstairs. Downstairs, his former assistant had his old job. She had betrayed him, too, and now she had his old job, which she was already making a mess of. Good. He must see to it that she really made a mess of it.
In the meantime, he was going to launch something big.
A light flashed on his desk; he hobbled to it and hit a button and a woman’s voice said, “Lieutenant-Commander Suter is here.”
“Send him in.”
He waited, standing behind his desk, his weight on the canes. He had a handsome face made haggard by constant pain, a long body with big shoulders from heaving it around on his hands. He had probably risen as high in the Central Intelligence Agency now as he ever would, and he knew it, and he was going to start having his fun.
The door opened. Suter paused in the doorway.
Shreed smiled. “Come on in.” He propped the canes against his desk and swung himself into the armchair. “I was going to call you, anyway. You settling in?”
“I know the route from my car to my office, anyway.”
“I have a task for you,” Shreed said. “You ready?”
Suter bobbed his head, cocking an eyebrow; it was a kind of acknowledgment or recognition.
Shreed took his time in settling himself at his desk. He leaned the steel canes against a spot that had held them so often it was worn. “I took you on,” Shreed said, “because I figured you’re my kind of bastard. Isn’t that what you figure?”
The faintest of smiles touched Suter’s face. “We seem to have a kind of meeting of the minds, yes.”
“You’re getting a late start here. I’ve pulled you in above a lot of other people who therefore hate your guts. Hate is good for a career. You just have to keep ahead of it. You’re used to being hated, I’m sure. Where did you get that suit?”
Suter was wearing a dark-blue rag that had nothing to recommend it except the crease in the trousers. He reddened and named a department store.
“It looks it. Anyway, I’m sending you someplace else—a place called the Interservice Virtual Intelligence Center.” He grinned. “I’ve made a deal with the devil. You’re going to see he keeps his part of the bargain. That may be just the suit for the devil.” He waved a hand. “Sit, sit; this is going to take a while. What do you know about a project called Peacemaker?”
Atlantic Fleet Headquarters, Norfolk.
“Project Peacemaker!”
In Conference Room B of LantFleet HQ, Alan Craik’s old squadron-mate LCDR “Rafe” Rafehausen was having a briefing. The briefing was part of a larger planning conference for Battle Group Seven, now in its formative stages as it prepared to join Sixth Fleet late that year. Consisting of the CV Andrew Jackson, a Tico-class missile cruiser, and associated destroyers, subs, and support ships, it would carry the flag of Admiral Rudolph Newman aboard the Jackson with Air Wing Five. For Rafe Rafehausen, this would be a make-or-break cruise: he was to join VS-49 as XO only three months before the battle group put to sea, with the awesome certainty that if he did the job well he would become skipper of the squadron two years after he signed on. At the moment, he was sitting in on the planning conference as a guest of the current VS-49 skipper and exec.
The briefer was a captain. Everything about him said he was a hardnose. He was laying it out as if he had been up to the mountain and got the plans on stone. He summarized: “And so this cruise will have two primary responsibilities—Project Peacemaker, in Libya’s