His imagination?
Or A-Bomb, looking for him?
He listened again, trying to blank his mind. Nothing. It had been a trick of his imagination, a tease of fear like the shadows had been.
Even so he took out his flare set, loaded the small gun with a pencil flare, poised to fire.
Complete silence and not a moving shadow in the sky.
Checklist mode.
He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but he didn’t feel hungry yet. Which was a fairly good thing — there were no Big Macs lying around, and the nearest falafel stand was quite a hike.
He had to leave the copse. He squatted down and began to re — inventory his gear, justifying the delay with the thought that it was the last time he might have a chance to do so before morning. He took each item out and placed it directly in front of him, the way a little kid might take stock of his Hot Wheels or baseball card collection. The ritual of touching each piece of equipment was comforting, reminding him that he had the tools to get out of this alive. Besides the survival radio and gun, Mongoose had a flashlight, three smoke-flares, the tiny flare gun and its bandoleer of flares, a compass, a strobe light, a whistle and matches, his maps, and Kath’s letter.
He held the still-sealed envelope in his hand as he continued examining his equipment. A magnesium striker — ought to be good for a few laughs, trying to spark kindling.
Hell, he’d done that in Boy Scouts, for christsakes. Pretty damn well, too. He had a merit badge for camping, didn’t he?
A couple of them. No shit.
He loved the survival hikes; just take a backpack and walk for a couple of days. What you carry is what you got. You can live off the land, if you’re tough enough.
For some reason he remembered his Boy Scout days better than the survival course he’d taken. Maybe because they had been so much fun, and the SERE had just been wet. His buddies in the Scouts would have loved a challenge like this.
Well, they would have said they would. Deep in enemy territory, on your own? They probably had talked about this kind of thing, not dreaming or wishing it, exactly, just kind of playing, the way kids did.
Wouldn’t his friends Blitz and Beef like to get their hands on this knife? Huge, well-sharpened blade and a round pearl handle, acquired two years before at a pawn shop in Germany.
Not a pawn shop. Some sort of specialty store.
Whatever. Checklist mode. Stow memory lane and play it back forever, to warm you up.
Stock taken, his next job was to move away from here. Again he contemplated firing a flare, but told himself he had to conserve them, wait until he heard something nearby. Besides, the Iraqis would be searching for at least a few more hours. Even though the flares were made so they would be difficult to see from the ground, they were not necessarily invisible, and he didn’t want to do anything that might encourage them to keep looking.
When he heard a plane or got an acknowledgment on the radio, of course, that would be different. But in the meantime, Job One, Item A, was to survive. And that meant being as low-key as possible.
Mongoose returned all of his equipment to its various nooks and crannies in his survival suit.
The last item was the letter.
He considered reading it, and even slid his finger to the pasted flap before stopping.
It could be bad news. Kathy could be telling him she’d found someone else and wanted a divorce.
Oh, yeah, right. Like that would really happen.
They were always good news. In the last letter, she’d written about how Robby could almost say “daddy.”
Not bad for a three-month-old.
He was almost four-months now. He didn’t feel a picture in the envelope, but you never knew unless you opened it.
A picture would keep him going.
Mongoose slipped his finger under the side of the paper. It was one of those tissue-thin jobs, where the writing paper folds up to become the envelope.
He’d feel a photo, and there wasn’t one here. If he opened the letter, it would be impossible to keep from reading it.
He ought to ration it like the water, spread it out so it would last. Read a few lines then stop.
No way he could do that. It wasn’t like stopping at just one water packet. He would read one sentence and his eyes would automatically grope for the next. And then the next. He’d have to use his flashlight and it would take five, ten, fifteen minutes.
He had to get going. This was the first place the Iraqis would look if they came for him.
Better to save the letter. A treat, make it. When he really felt down and couldn’t go on.
Carefully, he folded the envelope in half and the half again. He kept it in his hand as he started to walk from the small copse, kept it between his fingers for a long time before finally tucking it away.
PART TWO
HOME FRONT
CHAPTER 24
Ordinarily, Robby took a nap now. Kathy Johnson counted on it; she used the hour-long break from her infant son to take a shower and, sometimes, to sneak a cigarette on her mother-in-law’s porch. It wasn’t like she had to sneak out to smoke, exactly, but she’d made such a big thing about giving them up during her pregnancy that she felt she’d be letting people down if they knew she had gone back. And as welcoming as her husbands’ parents were toward her and the baby, they were still parents. It was an odd feeling, now that she was a parent herself.
But today Robby didn’t seem to want to nap. He was nearly four months old, born only a few weeks before her husband had gotten the news that he was leaving for the Gulf. She tried rocking him and singing; when that didn’t work Kathy gave him her breast again, swaying gently in the overstuffed old chair in their room. Finally, his eyes stayed closed. She waited until his arms went limp before getting up slowly and gently placing him inside the crib.
Stepping back, she suddenly felt very cold, as if wrapped in ice. She began to shudder. Her mother-in-law kept the thermostat at 72 degrees, and had double-insulated panes behind the storm windows, but Kathy felt the chill deep in her bones. She stood shivering for nearly a minute before it passed, and kept her arms wrapped tightly around her as she tiptoed from the room and headed down the hall toward the bathroom.
She had just started the water when the phone rang. She and the baby were alone in the house; there was an answering machine but she was afraid the noise would wake Robby and she rushed to take the call, even though it meant going all the way downstairs to the kitchen in only her robe.
Her brother Peter’s voice leapt from the receiver.
“Kathy?”
“Peter?”
“Go turn on CNN.”
She knew, then. The shudder she had felt a few minutes before returned with a fury; her body trembled so hard her robe fell open.
“Kath? I’ll stay on the line. Just turn on the TV.”
The phone was cordless. Kath carried it with her as she walked through the smallish Cape Cod to the living room as deliberately as she could manage.
Though she’d been here for weeks, she still hadn’t mastered the cable layout and the remote control. The screen flashed with a picture of a talk show host cajoling some guest into accepting a fashion makeover. Kathy had to go through channel by channel until finally the all-news network appeared.
Two men were talking. She thought she recognized the man on the right, a retired air force officer, though she couldn’t decide whether it was because she had actually seen him before on the channel or because he had a generic, bland sort of face.